Pandora And The Flying Dutchman Film Review: Cinephilia

Pandora And The Flying Dutchman is quite an intriguing film for it combines characteristic upperclass English cinematic amour propre, represented by terribly decent chaps doing terribly tweedy English things like breaking the world land speed record (in the case of Nigel Patrick) and collecting archeological fragments (in the case of Harold Warrender) and over-heated Hollywood romance, represented by Ava Gardener’s femme fatale. It is also notable for the influence of 1940's British Surrealist and Romanticist painting on the art direction and the marvellous Technicolor cinematography by Jack Cardiff who is best known for his work on the films of Powell and Pressburger. Gardener plays Pandora, a woman so beautiful that she drives men to their death. James Mason is the legendary Flying Dutchman, a lost soul doomed to wander the seas until he finds a woman willing to give up her life for love of him. Pandora is the avatar of the wife he once murdered because he suspected her, falsely, of infidelity. On one level it is a damn silly story and the film has all kinds of problems, not least being a sub-plot involving bull-fighter (Mario Cabré) smitten by Pandora although Patrick's public school racing car driver is not far off. But flawed as it is, along with Powell and Pressburger films such as The Red Shoes (1948), its florid romanticism and visual preciosity, with Mason and Gardener fetishized by the camera in almost equal proportions, makes for a jewel in British cinema of the period.

BTW: The tavern "Las Dos Tortugas" is the Spanish equivalent for "The Two Turtles", the tavern in Albert Lewin's ealier The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) BH

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