A-maz-ing

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Romatic tosh of the campest kind but then it was written and directed by that most florid of film-makers Albert Lewin and told, in contemporary terms, the story of the legend of the Flying Dutchman, condemned to roam the seas until he found a woman willing to die for him. He's James Mason at his most inscrutable and she's' Ava Gardner at her most glamorous and others camping it up in the cast include Nigel Patrick, Harold Warrender and Marius Goring though the main reason to see it is Jack Cardiff's gorgeous cinematography. It's full of beautiful images and the purplest of prose and often feels like a parody of itself. It's now considered something of a cult movie and is really nobody's finest hour, except maybe Cardiff's.

A British fantasy-drama draws inspiration from the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost-ship can never approach port and is doomed to sail forever in the sea, and revamped by writer/director Albert Lewin into a lachrymose romance between a Dutch captain, the selfsame Flying Dutchman, Hendrick van der Zee (Mason), and a drop-dead gorgeous Pandora Reynolds (Gardner), in a fictitious port town Esperanza, Spain.Pandora is surrounded by admirers, some of them are expatriate Britons, one of them even gulps a poisoned wine and kills himself in the occasion of the first anniversary their acquaintance, to the dismay of her indifference, and she doesn't even care to raise an eyebrow. However, an unremitting British racing driver Stephen Cameron (Patrick) almost wins her over by pushing his state-of-the- art racing car over the cliff just to prove his undying love, because Pandora calculates the measurement of love by how much a man can give up for loving her (soon she will discover what she has to give up for love as well). They are engaged! But there is an "almost", it is clear as day that she doesn't love Stephen, or any other man, including the spunky torero Juan Montalvo (Cabré).Can she ever love somebody after being created as a perfect specimen of female desirability? Only in the fantasy, maybe, so one night, beckoned by a mysterious ship anchored near the beach, Pandora swims to the ship and finds Hendrick, the sole being on board, is uncannily drawing a painting (a work made by Lewin's friend Man Ray) with exact her image, there are connections between them far beyond this life, as it will reveal, Hendrick is a perpetual wandering soul on the sea, under the curse that only a woman who is willing to die for him because of uncontaminated, unconditional love, can he be set free from the eternity of exile for his blasphemy and spur-of-the- moment sin. Here, the whole foolish and intrinsically jaundiced perspective of treating beautiful women as the ultimate sacrifice to assuage men's guilty over their own idiotic wrongdoings, is ghastly behind our times, which tolls the death knell for this otherwise handsomely and picturesquely shot piece of supernatural romance in Technicolor by cinematographer Jack Cardiff, its close cousin should be William Dieterle's PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1948).The opening, has already given away the forbidding end, and the film is mostly narrated by Pandora's friend, a British archaeologist Geoffrey Fielding (Warrender), who is in the safe age range to stay as a bystander with a morally superior eye, and sometimes by Hendrick himself, to cursorily introduce his past to viewers, those orations are ornate and over-literary, James Mason has been ill-fitted for the role, dour, ponderous and a complete misfit for Ms. Gardner's glamour turn, but as it always the case, whether it is Clark Gable in John Ford's MOGAMBO (1953), or Richard Burton in John Huston's THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964), Gardner can hardly find an equal worth her divine beauty and unrestrained candour, she is Pandora in real life, that's a tailor- made role of her no doubt, but the movie only resounds with a disappointing meh, no torrid flamenco, record-breaking car-racing, or corrida extravaganza can save the damp squib.

This is how a friend of mine began to describe "Pandora" to me on our way to school on an early morning in the spring of 1986. Two 12-year-old kids talking about a 35-year-old movie. Does this kind of thing ever happen today? I wonder. My friend had seen the movie. I hadn't; my mum and I had been watching another program on a different channel instead. So I asked my pal to give me a full account of this "weird" movie as he called it. I was much intrigued...What he told me then about a strange guy who was dead but alive, another guy with a racing car and who was half crazy, a bullfighter who was even crazier, and a saucy girl in the middle of all this mess, stood on my mind for years and years... I finally had a chance to see the film, seventeen years later, on British TV. I loved it!One of my favourite actors of all time: James Mason. One of the most beautiful and talented actresses of all time: Ava Gardner.The greatest work of one of the greatest cinematographers of all time: Jack Cardiff. One of the greatest opening lines in a movie ever: "When I first met Hendrick van der Zee it never occurred to me that he was not an ordinary man..." And one of the very first foreign films ever shot in Spain. And perhaps the greatest romantic love story ever filmed.

This film is a reworking of the legend of the Flying Dutchman. A wild and slightly crazy lady (Ava Gardner) is flighty and, well, rather nuts. When a sailboat nears her home in Spain, she impulsively swam naked out to the boat and meets a man (James Mason) after she wraps herself up in a bit of canvas. He seems VERY preoccupied and moody--and is working on a painting that looks a bit like Gardner (though I didn't think it looked nearly as close as the film said). She is clearly intrigued by this new man and wants to spend much time with him.A bit later, Gardner's friend (Nigel Patrick) shows the moody dude something written in 17th century Dutch--and Mason seems to be able to read it with ease. That's because it is, in fact, his own personal memoirs! It seems he's the famous Flying Dutchman and the paper explains how he came to be cursed to wander the seas alone for eternity--unless, and this is weird, he can get a lady to agree to die for him. You also learn that Gardner is some sort of reincarnated version of the lady Mason murdered--hence, cursing him to his fate."Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" is a lovely film, as the color stock used is quite nice and makes the leading lady (Gardner) look her best. However, it's far from a perfect film and it wasn't exactly my type of film--even though I love older films. The film has two problems for me. First, it's an odd choice having the British actor James Mason play a person who is Dutch. It just didn't seem convincing--much as I love Mason in films. Second, the film took brooding to new heights--with LOTS of pained looks. And, third, the film seemed a bit talky--and I would have preferred a bit more action and romance. Worth seeing but far from a must-see.By the way, wasn't the murder a bit reminiscent of "Othello"? Just thinking...