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 to highlight the unorthodoxy, originality and vision of this film (if not always the execution), and I finished the book wanting to see it more than any other.

It took an intervention by Martin Scorsese (a deus ex machina if ever there was one) to determine that not only would that be possible, but to ensure that it'd be on the big screen, thanks to his curation of a special season at the BFI featuring various oddities that have inspired him over the years. And seeing this farcically ambitious film as it was intended allowed me to luxuriate in its Spanish coastal locales, its incomparably sensuous leading lady, and writer, director and co-producer Albert Lewin's decidedly odd approach to just about everything, from shot framing to the rules of narrative (no, Albert, to the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever done a dream sequence within a flashback within a flashback before; even The Locket didn't try, and that had flashbackitis).

It's a bold, serious-minded and, yes, dreamlike film – though not without humour – that asks us to believe in faith, in fate, in legends, as Mason's sailor is doomed to sail the earth unless he can atone for his sins by, erm, making a woman die for him (bit sexist). He's good, though it's Gardner, as a cruel beauty transfigured by love, who dominates – she was often derided as an actress, especially during this period, but her untaught naturalism has aged extremely well, immune to changing modes of performance.

She is also the flat-out sexiest, most erotic actress there has ever been on screen: not the prettiest, not even necessarily the most well-proportioned or of a type still considered fashionable, but she has what Billy Wilder once called 'flesh appeal', appearing in 3D when everyone else is in two, her visceral appearance allied to a knowingness, a mixture of the ruthless and the vulnerable, and an ease in her skin that is intoxicating. Especially on the big screen.

Her conviction and attractiveness are as much a key to making this film work as Lewin's impassioned writing and his and Jack Cardiff's remarkable visual sense: notably exemplified by that shot of Gardner's face almost as a landscape, Patrick some vague cipher approaching her eternal beauty (a shot that seems to me to be echoed by Vilmos Zsigmond in The Argument); or her scarf on a headless statue that points out to the sea that will ultimately take her (that's not a spoiler, it's revealed in the first scene). I don't doubt that it was Cardiff's photography that drew, Scorsese, a massive Michael Powell buff, to the movie. Cardiff shot several of Powell's most celebrated films, including The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.

The film is a little long-winded, at times simply too po-faced, relies overly on voiceover, and occasionally tips over into pretension or silliness, but it's also a genuinely ambitious, literate and artistic film, full of imaginative language, camera angles and ideas, and with just the right actress to play the beautiful, sensuous and thoroughly doomed Pandora. In fact, the only actress who could have done it.