Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Lewin, 1951)
My Fall Movies # 16
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In a time when «romantic melodrama» means «Nicholas Sparks», the idiosyncracies of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman cannot help but be refreshing. Chiefly, Lewin’s film is a visual experience, and though it’s headlined by Ava Gardner and James Mason, there’s no question that the true star is cinematographer Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes). Surely, more than anything or anyone, it’s Cardiff that drew Martin Scorsese to lend his name to a 2009 restoration of this 1951 Technicolor picture. Scorsese speaks to Cardiff’s skill with Technicolor and rakish sense of composition when he says of Pandora, «Watching this film is like entering a strange and wonderful dream.» One suspects writer/director Lewin was more focused on the film’s literary merits than anything else; a former English professor, he threads literary and historical allusions throughout the story: primary narrator Geoffrey Fielding (Harold Warrender) is a professorial archeologist and poetry lover that can only be Lewin’s surrogate. […] Fielding laments, «We live in a time that has no faith in legends. We live in a time that has no faith.» It’s a convincing argument to meet the film where it lives; too langorous for its own good. […] its unique oddball blend of fatalistic Hemingway-esque masculinity, swoony romance and mythology, literary allusions («Dover Beach» and The Rubaiyat) used as pick-up lines, and grab bag of styles (including, at one point, a highly theatrical use of soliloquy) makes Pandora and the Flying Dutchman nearly as hypnotic as the romance it retells. (More here.)
