Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Albert Lewin – 1951 – England

While not a major director, Albert Lewin had an intriguing career. After many years as a writer and production associate in Hollywood studios, Lewin took the daring step of becoming something that had no name at the time, an auteur. He wrote, produced and directed six independent features between 1942 and 1957, often showcasing noticeably mature literary and sensuous subject matter for their time, including The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). But his most remarkable film might be the moody and poetic Pandora and the Flying Dutchmen, a modern retelling of the famous ghost ship legend. Photographed by Jack Cardiff on location in Catalonia, Spain, the film tells the tale of a capricious femme fatale, Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner), who wreaks havoc on men’s lives by making them prove their love for her. She is not a conniving or ambitious villainess as in film noir, though, but more an elemental creature who seems to have no consciousness of her effect on people. Filling the void in her soul with amusement and sensation, she lets a celebrated race-car driver and a fiery matador woo her even though she loves neither of them. She is stopped in her tracks, however, by the arrival of a strange vessel in the harbor in front of her villa, the presence of which reminds her of the Flying Dutchman story and compels her to swim out to it one night and climb aboard. There she meets a tormented and brooding painter, Hendrick van der Zee, (played by the tormented and brooding James Mason), who lives alone on his empty schooner and coincidentally is in the middle of painting an interpretation of the mythological Pandora. Fate indeed seems to have thrust them together. Though an American, Albert Lewin’s style could easily cause Pandora and the Flying Dutchman to be mistaken for a work by his British contemporaries the Archers, due in no small part to Cardiff’s contribution as well as the high pitch of l’amour fou and melodrama presented as a latter-day fable; (even Marius Goring from The Red Shoes pops up in a small role as one of Pandora’s earliest victims).