Watched for the Week 11 prompt for Film School Dropouts; Cinematographer: Jack Cardiff

Like most, I associate Jack Cardiff with the splendid visual masterworks of The Archers (co-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), particularly the dazzling Technicolor dreamscapes of The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death. For this prompt, I wanted to see Cardiff's work with other directors and I started with the bloated but beautiful War and Peace and then moved to a late career work-for-hire underwhelmer, The Cat's Eye, before I blissfully washed ashore with Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Here I found a non-Archers movie to fall in love with Cardiff's work. And I fell hard for this one.

I'm not familiar with writer-director Albert Lewin but his backstory is interesting, as he worked his way up from assistant to studio heads at MGM to head of production and then into directing; though he was a 1940s and 1950s anomaly of someone who directed once every few years, counter to the customary two-three films a year click that most filmmakers embarked on. And I'll have to check out Lewin because Pandora, speaking of Archers, hit an arrow deep into my chest. Where my heart once was, there's now a painting of Ava Gardner. This was so splendidly beautiful and so lushly melodramatic and soap operatic (there are multiple curses! dreams within flashbacks within flashbacks!), it reminded me of the first highs I got from watching Douglas Sirk for the first time. It fully embraces the beauty of melodrama not through enhancing the pluck of heartstrings but through embracing the beauty of the moving image and of its movie stars.

The story is essentially an entire Spanish seaside town of men who fall in love and are willing to die or kill for Ava Gardner's Pandora. One suitor is a writer, one is a race car driver, one is a matador, and another is a mysterious Dutch sailor who pulls into the port and paints pictures on his decadent boat. We meet Pandora at a weary moment. She is wanted and desired, but she is bored. When a former lover poisons himself she shows no emotion at his passing, just glad to be rid off his oppressive attention; she remarks that she had no time for emotions that bubbled up from drinking because those emotions are so very predictable.

Those types of emotions also funnel inward and that is not what Pandora desires. Pandora desires an outward boast of connection that imparts inward damage. For instance, she asks the race car driver to launch his car into the ocean and then she will marry him. He does and she feels the love in that moment but then loses it because he retrieves the car from the sea, and thus the grand gesture was hollow. The matador threw a knife at another man for her in the past, but this time he won't go against the superstitions involved in a tarot card deck. Another lost gesture.

At the mid point of the film, while all the men attempt to unlock Pandora's Box, a woman chastises her at dinner, exclaiming "you're interested only in sensation, not in sentiment!" And while this is true, I revert back to an early shot in the film in which Cardiff shoots Pandora laying on the ground and he's so up close to her face, which is only lit by moonlight, that her features look like a landscape. This luminous shot happens when Pandora is requesting her lover to send his car over the cliff's edge. And her facial contours might best represent the lay of the land. She is attracted to sensation yes because the sentiment seems to come and go. The men in her life have shown their sentiment through destructive acts, such as jettisoning a vehicle, stabbing another man, or poisoning themselves. Such is the lay of the land for love in Pandora's world and she's merely attempting to instigate those bursts of sensations because they reveal a sentiment in the moment.

Now, the movie stranger (here, James Mason), of course will always hold the answer to life's movie riddles and the Dutch painter does hold intel on Pandora's past. This is a movie about eternal life coming from fits of chasing sensations, impulsivity without faith, leading to eternity. And there is a deep depression in Pandora and why she seeks sensations, as if she's given up on sentiment entirely. Perhaps it's because she too is drifting through eternity and only enlivened through grand gestures. There is a scene from the past in which the stranger denounces God and the idea of eternity while he's being sentenced to death for killing his lover, but then his death sentence becomes a cursed eternal life that cannot be unbroken unless a woman would die for him. And thus this impulsive man is forced to live out eternity under a curse that will keep him from living without true love unless he can find someone to cross over with him via an impulsive, sensational act of suicide. And thus the siren who comes to him, swims to his boat in the nude with all vulnerability (and immense testing of the Hays Production Code).

The curse itself isn't what makes Pandora soar, however. It's the razor's edge that Gardner walks with the men who adore her. It's the sharp camera movements of Cardiff, with deceptive pans and zooms, turning situations into a Pandora's Box of possible (impossible) outcomes. And also it's in the go-for-broke storytelling approach of Lewin who, as I mentioned, films a dream sequence within a flashback that returns to a flashback, seamlessly. Everything here works like the peaceful waves of memory, making sudsy laps in the sand. An elegant manipulative woman chooses her future between a poet, a matador, a race car driver, and a man who's lived hundreds of years. These are the days of their lives.