Pandora Reynolds is a woman who has never fallen in love – but one who men kill and die for. When she meets dashing and mysterious ship's captain Hendrik van der Zee, he pushes her to commit the ultimate act of love.
James Mason Ava Gardner Nigel Patrick Sheila Sim Harold Warrender Mario Cabré Marius Goring John Laurie Abraham Sofaer Patricia Raine Marguerite d'Alvarez John La Pillina Francisco Igual Guillermo Beltrán Mateos Lilli Molnar Phoebe Hodgson Pamela Mason Gabriel Carmona Antonio Martín Lolita Allergria Helen Cleverley Pepe de la Isla Christiana Forbes Eddie Leslie Dido Plumb Ricardo Valle Gerald Welsh
Pandora, Η Πανδώρα και ο Ιπτάμενος Ολλανδός, Pandora ja lentävä hollantilainen, Pandora und der fliegende Holländer, Pandora y el holandés errante, Pandora og den flyvende hollænder, Pandora och den flyggade holländaren, 판도라와 방랑하는 화란인, Pandora und der Fliegende Holländer, 潘多拉与飞翔的荷兰人, Пандора и летящият холандец, Os Amores de Pandora, 판도라, Пандора и Летучий Голландец, Pandora i l’holandès errant, Pandora y el Holandés errante, Pandora och den flygande holländaren
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A mainstream art film with Hollywood stars, and, as such, one of the most interesting movies of its era. It’s a metaphysical love story in which a poet (Marius Goring), a racing driver (Nigel Patrick), a matador and the Flying Dutchman himself (James Mason) risk death or worse in their pursuit of former nightclub singer Ava Gardner, and who can blame them?
I've wanted to see this somewhat notorious curio since reading Lee Server's biography of Gardner more than five years ago, which painted the actress as a voracious, hedonistic auto-didact who left behind her dirt-poor Southern upbringing to become a muse to some of the era's greatest men (including Hemingway), before depressingly if flamboyantly self-destructing. Server was at pains…
Technicolor and melodrama were made for one another. Colors evoke and influence emotions, and the richer the colors, the richer the emotions. Even when this film is muted, it is still bright and alive, still imbued with the power of its chromatic wonders. Beige and brown feel equal to red, blue, and green when they are painted through this film. Unite that with the performances of Gardner and Mason, the volumes spoken in their eyes and bodies, straining against feeling, and with the unnerving fantasy, the neatly unraveled pseudo-mystery, and you find a film that seems like a universal story of self-destructive love. Somehow their cruel personae make them more alluring; somehow their fates are still heartbreaking.
It has no business being any better than second rate Archers, but sometimes a film can try so hard to achieve greatness, it gets there almost by accident.
The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it.
Strangely captivating. Love’s ecstasy as transportation, the face as map to the stars. Pick your poison; past or future. Jack Cardiff the 🐐
Good god this movie has no business being as absolutely beautiful as it is. Stunningly gorgeous lighting and framing, inspired angles, beautiful costumes, amazing miniatures, beautiful sets, Ava Gardner’s fuckin’ everything. Which immortal can I stab to get her last black striped dress? But, Like, genuinely, what the hell? This is Powell and Pressburger meets Sirk with a dash of Fellini.
A dreamy if not utterly ridiculous plot, complete with storybook narration and a classical love story that revolves more around accepting death than romance. You can call it everything from cornball to maudlin, but it doubles down so hard on its fantastical elements in both its filmmaking and in the acting that it somehow genuinely rises to mythical. That Ava…
190/200
This is the kind of thing that makes a worldview; the classic “hollywood” film you prize above all else. If I had to save one technicolor movie I might choose this at the expense of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, so thank god I’ll never have to make that call. This is the kind of movie that helped me see what I wanted from movies, and what movies too infrequently give.
www.rogerebert.com/mzs/the-unloved-part-92-pandora-and-the-flying-dutchman
Jack Cardiff REALLY was out there in the 40s and 50s doing the absolute most with natural light and technicolor....a king
I so wanted to dig this but I found Ava Gardner’s Pandora such an abstraction, the love between her and James Mason’s Dutchman arch and trite. A film so clearly not written with women or women characters in mind so much as men enacting their venomous, hollow ideas of women out with lushly rendered trappings that admittedly beguile the eye. Gardner in this film demonstrates her physical beauty at its most striking but also the limitations of that beauty because she comes across so hollow, so cruel, so foolish. This really left a sour taste.
"My salvation."
sure im overrating this whatever. technicolor melodrama ghost love story with james mason and nigel patrick. how could i NOT love it. almost feels like a powell and pressburger in its atmospheric romance but at the same time is unique to itself. UGH. blown away by the sincerity and the beauty and the performances and the love.
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…
