PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 669, 2 May 1952, Page 19

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

(Romulus) eo: LEWIN, who wrote, and directed Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, asks us to believe (or, as they say, to suspend disbelief) for ‘a couple of hours in a story that twenty years ago the Flying Dutchman, on one of his sojourns among mortals, put in at a Spanish port, where he met the beautiful Pandora-a reincarnation, it turned out, of the wife he had murdered so many years before. This isn’t, I suppose, an impossible sort of tale to put across, but neither is it. an easy one, and it presented for me similar obstacles to those I faced in David and Bathshkeba. Don’t misunderstand me. The fact is, I seem to suspend disbelief in film versions of legendary tales or the lives of well-known historical characters just about as unwillingly as anyone I’ve met, and in all humility I ask. readers to allow for this when I say that while Pandora didn’t bore me, it .seldom gripped me and ‘sometimes made me squirm. Filmed in Technicolor and including some beautiful photography by Jack Cardiff (of The Magic Box), Pandora begins at the end, then unfolds its story in flashback frofm just before the first meeting of Pandora (Ava Gardner) with Henryck (James Mason); who is, of course, the Flying Dutchman in mufti. As a destructive young woman who has her admirers prove their love by spectacular self-sacrifice, Miss Gardner seems more or less at home, but the ‘other-worldly mood expected of her later is rather more than she can manage. Mr. Mason (still moody and frowning, as indeed you’d expect of a man condemned to live for ever), makes on the whole a better job of his part. Yet might not this sort of thing be more. acceptable if the players’ faces (and private lives) were less familiar? " Actually, I found the attempt on the world speed record by Pandora’s fiancé (Nigel Patrick) the most exciting thing in the film, though the fine bull-fight sequences (Mario Cabre is a real-life matador) will probably hit you hardest if you haven’t been conditioned by The Brave Bulls. Whether these incidents (like Miss Gardner’s bewildering changes of frock) were really put in to carry forward the story in a film which ends up 11,000 feet long, I wouldn’t like to say. © : ;