Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (UK, 1951)

[Maurice]

Sunday Telegraph 'DVD of the Week'



Alan Stanbrook:



This is a 1951 British picture by Hollywood's Albert Lewin, essaying a modern variant on the Flying Dutchman legend, in which a 17th-century naval captain slays his supposedly faithless wife and is condemned to sail the seven seas forever unless he can find a woman prepared to die for him.



It's set in a Spanish fishing village in the interwar years, with James Mason as the doomed sailor and Ava Gardner as the cool beauty who might be his salvation.



Lewin was, in Hollywood terms, an unusually cultured director, and his script shows familiarity not only with the legend but with the RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM, which provides a remarkably apt closing stanza.



The film's sophistication is matched by an irresistible glamour. It's almost as if Lewin sensed in his actress the spell that lures, in the story, so many men to their fate, or, hopefully, their salvation.



In that context he found an ideal cameraman in the great Jack Cardiff, whose early Technicolour photography is in a class of its own.

[moonfleet]