PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN: Blu-ray (Romulus/MGM, 1951) Cohen Media Group
Morosely quixotic, hauntingly imaginative and eerily disconcerting,
even under contemporary scrutiny, director, Albert Lewin's Pandora and the
Flying Dutchman (1951) is a lurid and menacing fantasy, spanning the
boundless depths of reckless and raw human passion. Starring the luminous,
incomparable beauty, Ava Gardner and wickedly charismatic, James Mason, the
picture was released in the U.S. by MGM, although its roots were firmly
British, made by Romulus Films and produced by Lewin and Joe Kaufmann, from his
own screenplay. The real legend of the ‘Flying Dutchman’ portends of
doom, grounded in a 17th century myth about a phantom ship ominously
glowing in the fog. So, the legend regales, if hailed, the crew of the Dutchman
will try sending messages to people, long since dead. The vanishing act of this
ghostly vessel ironically appealed to Lewin, who almost as intriguingly marked
his debut in Hollywood in 1942, only to disappear from the picture-making biz a
scant 15 years later, after only 6 movies. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
is nestled at the start of Lewin’s last act finale; the Brooklyn-born, Lewin,
having earned an MA from Harvard and teaching English at the University of
Missouri, before segueing into a brief career as a drama/film critic, then
screenwriter at MGM in the early 1920’s, where he quickly ingratiated himself
into VP Irving Thalberg’s good graces. After Thalberg’s death, Lewin moved to
Paramount where he produced several key projects between 1937 and 1941. But
Lewin’s desire was to command the whole works; to write, produce and direct
from his own material. And thus, in 1942, he did just that.
In hindsight, all of Lewin’s movies aspire to a
literary and cultural high-mindedness; not exactly, what Hollywood, or the
picture-making biz in totem, had in mind – then, or now. There is an elusive,
dream-like quality to Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, tinged in a shadowy
and ruminating sagacity, even from the outset. Be forewarned, all will not end
happily for our devious and devil-may-care exotic bird of paradise. And indeed,
as Lewin’s brilliant narrative slowly unwinds, we begin to imagine the worst is
yet to come. The pervading legacy of death and decay is abated only slightly by
cinematographer extraordinaire, Jack Cardiff’s exquisite use of 3-strip
Technicolor to elicit a weirdly disconcerting mixture of ghostly romanticism; a
love affair between people who are already dead in their hearts, although only
one is fast-approaching her own mortality.
Our story is set in 1930, and begins with the grim discovery of two
bodies caught in the nets of a small group of fishermen toiling in the tiny Spanish
hamlet of Esperanza. The resultant ringing of church bells stirs the locals,
the police, and, a resident archaeologist, Geoffrey Fielding (Harold
Warrender), to the dreamily lit beach. Careworn and sorrowful, Fielding slumps
back to his villa, before addressing the audience directly with the tale of
Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner), an American nightclub singer, and, this movie’s
femme fatale.
Pandora is that uniquely elusive creature, a woman, so
utterly ravishing, yet devoid of a human soul she cannot help but compel otherwise
sane men on to their doom. The men who encounter her beauty immediately fall
under its spell. Alas, Pandora is incapable of reciprocating their affections.
Instead, she tests the nature of their fidelity by demanding each surrender
something of value to her, citing Fielding’s quote that ‘the measure of love
is how much you are willing to sacrifice for it.’ To prove the merits of
his obsessive love for her, embittered Reggie Demarest (Marius Goring) drinks
wine laced with poison and dies in front of Pandora and her friends. While the
others are aghast, Pandora remains indifferent, even slightly bored by Reggie’s
ultimate sacrifice. Instead, she enters into a marriage with race car driver,
Stephen Cameron (Nigel Patrick), after he breaks the land-speed record – and
almost his neck - by wrecking his beloved automobile in the sea at Pandora’s
request. That very evening, a Dutch captain, Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason)
arrives in Esperanza. Hendrik is not like the others. He resists Pandora’s more
obvious distractions. Thus, under the cover of moonlight, she swims nude out to
his yacht, only to discover him painting a portrait of her, posed as the
Pandora from Greek mythology, whose willful acts brought an end to earthly
paradise. From this auspicious meeting, Hendrik appears also to have fallen
under Pandora’s enchantment, even moving into the same hotel as the other
expatriates, simply to be near her.
Recognizing an ominous force brewing from within, Geoffrey
befriends the enigmatic and aloof Hendrick, with whom he collaborates on
Geoffrey's local finds. One such relic is a notebook written in Old Dutch.
Geoffrey suspects Hendrick to be the Flying Dutchman, a 16th century
captain on trial for the murder of his wife whom he believes was actually unfaithful
in their marriage. At trial, the captain blasphemed against God and was
promptly sentenced to death. However, on the eve of his execution, an unearthly
force freed the Dutchman from his prison cell. Fleeing to his waiting ship, the
Capt. fell into a trance in which it was revealed to him he had wronged his
wife who was innocent of the crime of infidelity. The dream thus concluded with
a curse - the Capt. doomed to eternally sail the seas, unless he could find a
woman whose passion was stirred enough to die for him. Every seven years, the
Dutchman could go ashore for six months to search for such a woman. Despite her
impending wedding to Stephen, Pandora declares her love for Hendrick. Mercifully,
he is quite unwilling to have her perish for his salvation, and, instead,
attempts to provoke her into despising him.
Pandora is also adored by Juan Montalvo (Mario Cabré),
a conceited bullfighter who, in his obsessive determination to possess Pandora
as his own, cruelly murders Hendrick in an act of fitful jealousy. However, as
soon as Montalvo departs in haste, Hendrick is stirred back to life. Indeed, he is the Capt. as Geoffrey
suspected and, as such, cannot die. The next day, Hendrick attends the
bullfight. Knowing what he has done, Montalvo is overcome by fear and fatally
gored by the bull. Before expiring, Montalvo informs Pandora of his murderous
act, thus adding to her bewilderment. Pursuing the matter with Geoffrey,
Pandora is shown the ancient manuscript about the Flying Dutchman. Meanwhile,
Hendrick’s escape is thwarted when his yacht becomes marooned on a sandbar. On
learning the true nature of her tortured lover, Pandora swims out to Hendrick. Now,
he confides the truth, providing a small portrait of his murdered wife. The two
women are uncannily alike. Hendrick explains, they are already man and wife.
But he has denied himself eternal salvation because it will cost Pandora her
life. Having finally learned to love, Pandora is undaunted by this discovery.
Indeed, she is committed to remaining with Hendrick for all eternity. Thus, after
a ferocious storm at sea, the next morning, the bodies of Pandora and the
Dutchman are recovered by the villagers.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a fancifully
told, methodically paced and highly romanticized pastiche, steeped in symbolism
and the supernatural. Lewin’s methodical pacing will leave those who believe ‘moving
pictures’ need to…well…‘move’ with an jaw-dropping sense of ennui.
But for those compelled onward by Jack Cardiff’s spell-binding cinematography,
and, the hypnotic allure of Ava Gardner (in her first Technicolor feature)
looking positively ravishing, the picture endures as a strange, often
metaphysical meditation into which suicide, auto-racing, murder and archaeology
make only fleeting inroads into some decidedly very strange bedfellows. Love’s
existentialist sway is only marginally dampened by the profounder pondering of
fate, and, the usual richness and integrity with which Lewin and Kaufman have
tapped into a much more ambient vein of moral ambiguity, as well as tortured/lost
opportunities, gets singed with more than an inference of eternal damnation to
all too earthly regrets. The more philosophical the debate becomes, the more
steadily splendid and matchless this movie ages – the oddity in its
mythological doomed romance, mashed against the enormity of its flamboyant
scenic ornamentation. If the movie has a flaw it is, perhaps, that Lewin has
become a tad too enamored with romanticizing the dalliance that, stripped of its
exquisite scenery and moodily lit bravura, is basically distilled into a rather
straight-forward tale, leaning in the stylish uber-noir strain: the proverbial
and time-honored femme fatale comes up against her male counterpart.
While James Mason was already a star by this time, and
Ava Gardner would be given a meteoric catapult into the stratosphere of super
stardom immediately following this picture, the real find here is Mario Cabré
as the arrogant matador, Juan Montalvo. Cabré’s career in pictures was
relatively brief, from 1951-68. Born to theatrical artists, Cabré was actually
a real bullfighter, victorious in over 600 competitions in a little over 5 years,
but seriously gored no less than 6 times. On the side, Cabré dabbled as an
actor, prolifically published more than twenty volumes of poetry, became an PR
announcer for a textile company, and, performed as a musician. His undeniably handsome good looks earned him
several lovers in Hollywood. Depending on the source consulted, these were to
include his co-star in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (although, in
Gardner’s autobiography, she claims Cabré’s dishonorable intentions were neither welcome,
nor reciprocated), and, later, Ivonne de Carlo, Irene Papas and Ángela Tamayo.
Felled by a near fatal stroke in 1976, immediately thereafter followed by a
devastating heart attack, the emergency operation to save his life caused acute
hemiplegia that paralyzed half his body. And although through sheer willpower, Cabré learned to
write with his left hand to continue his vocation as a poet, he spent the bulk
of his later years in seclusion, partially paralyzed. He died in Barcelona on
July 1, 1990, age – 74.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is as
noteworthy for the only documented ‘living footage’ of the great Welsh poet,
Dylan Thomas, who attended the shooting of the car race at Pendine Sands, a
beach near his home in Wales. If you can spot him, the as-ever reclusive and
dapper Thomas is the diminutive fellow, sporting a brown jacket and beige
trousers, situated to the extreme left of the film frame. As an interesting
homage of sorts, the tavern where Gardner’s luscious lass sings, Las Dos
Tortugas was named by the director after the Limehouse pub, prominently
featured in Lewin’s earlier film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1945). Shot mostly in Costa Brava and Tossa de Mar, Catalonia, Spain, where
today stands a statue of Gardner, erected on the hillside to mark the occasion,
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’s general release was delayed so MGM
could capitalize on Gardner’s standout performance in their Technicolor reboot
of Show Boat (1951). The
picture’s central theme, seeking to answer the question of what is love in a
world that worships only the pleasures of the flesh, yields to a magnificent
fable. Following his collaboration with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger on
A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The
Red Shoes (1948) Cardiff’s inimitable craftsmanship here is at its peak.
Cardiff’s cinematography evolves into a hallucinogenic meditation on the
space/time continuum and these lost souls, given their chance to be eternally
liberated. According the movie, death is but a porthole from which the already
deceased might return to stake their claim upon the reincarnated living.
A rare indie, budgeted at more than a million (a
king’s ransom in 1951), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was previously
afforded a photo-chemical Technicolor restoration in 2008, fully funded by
Martin Scorsese’s nonprofit Film Foundation and derived from 35mm archival
elements, released on Blu-ray vial Kino’s ‘classic’ line-up. Scorsese’s efforts
were nothing short of monumental, re-combining original nitrate elements and
incorporating a set of separation positives made from an original camera
negative. With the advent of vast improvements made in the realm of digital
technologies, it later became possible to achieve even more cohesive results,
with advanced color grading done at George Eastman’s Film Preservation Services,
and advanced dirt and scratch removal, completed by Prasad in India. And now,
we have the movie brought back into full focus and beautifully remastered by Cohen
Media Group, named after billionaire real estate developer and avid cinephile,
Charles S. Cohen: an organization very uniquely invested in the resuscitation of
film history. The restoration of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman has
been an international and pain-staking effort between Cohen Media Group and OCS
– a French broadcaster.
Applying patience and precision to their frame-by-frame
reconstruction, Cohen’s Blu-ray easily bests the old Kino Classic release,
having virtually eradicated all of the age-related damage that afflicted a good
deal of the image before, and, homogenized the visual disparities inherent when
working with source materials from various generations. The results speak for
themselves – a refined, gorgeous and brilliantly achieved master, resurrecting
the vibrant hues of vintage 3-strip Technicolor to their very best advantage.
Cardiff’s magnificent cinematographer looks more exquisite than arguably it
ever has on home video. While nothing can precisely duplicate the picture’s
opening night splendor on 35mm, this Blu-ray comes about as daringly close as
anyone might have hoped. Colors are superbly balanced. Flesh tones sparkle. The
moody moonlit skies are once again azure, and Gardner’s lipstick, blood-red and
glistening. Contrast is excellent and film grain appears very indigenous to its
source. The mono audio has also been afforded a DTS 1.0 upgrade, sounding
excellent. Extras include an original theatrical trailer, Hedda Hopper’s
trailer, and, a restoration trailer, plus alternate opening credits and a restoration
featurette. Cohen has sweetened the deal even further, electing to restore and
remaster 1957’s The Living Idol (included on a separate Blu-ray) –
Lewin’s rarely seen Cinemascope foray into full-on horror, in which an
archaeologist, Dr. Alfred Stoner (James Robertson Justice) and a careworn
American reporter, Terry Matthews (Steve Forrest) endeavor to liberate a
frightened woman, Juanita’s (Liliane Montevecci) soul from a hideous Aztec
curse.
The Living Idol was a commercial flop for MGM in
1957, but deserves further consideration as a forgotten film. Lewin’s direction
is glacial, but his shots of the Chichen Itza ruins in Yucatan and other
locations in and around Mexico City, lensed by another stellar cinematographer,
Jack Hildyard, are mesmerizing. In retrospect, it is a sincere pity the badly
mangled screenplay by René Cardona and Lewin, ironically based on Lewin’s own
novel, never elevates either the terror or titillation to adult levels. From a
purely narrative perspective, The Living Idol is an ornamental travesty
with Montevecci, a thoroughly wooden, if only slightly doomed heroine.
Nevertheless, we commend Cohen Media Group for affording it a restoration
effort as well. While not as refined an image, The Living Idol sports wonderfully reproduced colors, excellent detail, good solid contrast, with only a minor hint of black crush and edge effects. Bottom line: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a movie
that, while somewhat ill-received by the critics in 1951 has gone on to be reassessed
as a fascinating, if marginally flawed, masterpiece. Cohen’s Blu-ray is a
blessing and one so very easy to recommend. Buy with confidence. Treasure
forever.
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman – 4
The Living Idol – 2.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman - 4.5
The Living Idol - 4
EXTRAS
3
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