The Measure of Love: ‘Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’ (1951)

This post is part of The James Mason Blogathon, hosted by Maddy Loves Her Classic Films. See the other posts here.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is set in Spain in the 1930s. Much of it takes place by the sea. Its lead characters are the embodiment of a Dutch maritime legend and a woman named after a Greek myth. It contains a racing car, bullfights, a Surrealist painting, an antique manuscript and death. It eschews the mundane in favour of delirium. It is magnificent.

Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner) is a nightclub singer and notorious beauty who collects admirers like other people collect stamps. Her lovers are prone to stunts, offerings laid at her feet. One night she takes pity on Reggie Demarest (Marius Goring), drinking himself into oblivion for love of her, and agrees to sing for him—the same ballad she sang when they first met. He gazes at her like a parched man longing for rain. “You sang that as though you meant it,” he tells her. “But not for me.” That same night, Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason) sails in with the tide and Fate closes in.

Albert Lewin was one of Hollywood’s greatest aesthetes, certainly one of its most unapologetic. A screenwriter turned producer and director, he specialised in films in which art, beauty and darkness are intertwined. Art collides with obsession in The Moon and Sixpence, when a stockbroker abandons his family to become a painter, and with ambition in The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, where a writer exploits women to further his career. The libertine who leads innocents astray in The Picture of Dorian Gray loves beauty almost as much as he loves corrupting it. All three were played by George Sanders, whose arch, detached quality found a perfect outlet in Lewin. All three films were also adaptations—of novels by W. Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant and Oscar Wilde respectively.

For Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, his first original screenplay, Lewin set out to prove the age of miracles had not passed and created his own myth: a heady mixture of physical and spiritual, old and new. Hendrik quotes ‘Dover Beach’ and finds Pandora off the coast of Esperanza, or ‘hope’. Geoffrey Fielding (Harold Warrender), an archaeologist and friend of Pandora’s, acts as the film’s Greek chorus. A jazz party spills onto the beach, dancers charlestoning amidst ruins.

The film’s characters exist in a heightened reality, where every sense is sharpened and every emotion more keenly felt. Even the colours are brighter. Jack Cardiff, a master of Technicolor cinematography, paints the screen with such lustre each frame seems to glow.

Lewin transports us to another world; James Mason keeps us there. Much has been written about Mason’s voice: languid, liquid, the sound of molten gold. But the intensity of his gaze is taken for granted. Pandora impulsively swims out to a stranger’s yacht at night and, not seeing any crew, invites herself aboard. Below decks she finds a man painting at an easel. He turns and stares. Mason mesmerizes without saying a word. At last Pandora looks at the painting (in reality the work of Man Ray, a friend of Lewin’s) and is astonished to see her own face gazing back at her: Hendrik has painted the portrait of a woman he has never met and as the mythical Pandora no less. Unnerved, she lashes out, obliterating the portrait’s face. “Aren’t you angry?” she asks. “I was angrier once, long ago. I can never be angry again,” he replies.

Mason’s solemnity gives the film its weight. Geoffrey stumbles across a 17^th century Dutch manuscript and asks Hendrik to translate it. Hendrik begins to read aloud and Mason’s voice spirits us into a sequence like a Baroque painting brought to life. Believing his wife unfaithful, the Flying Dutchman murders her and is cursed to wander for all eternity, seeking the woman whose love might redeem him in the eyes of God. But she must be willing to die for him. The sight of Hendrik—for he and the Dutchman are one and the same—trapped alone on his ship as the timbers creak and ghostly hands take in the sails, haunts the soul.

Pandora seems an unlikely answer to his prayers. Actresses are casually referred to as goddesses but Ava Gardner was one of the few who could convincingly play one (Venus in One Touch of Venus). Cardiff’s camera worships her. Pandora is a divinity among mortals; love of her leads to ruin. It’s little surprise when Reggie drops dead—his suicide a last tribute to an implacable goddess. Pandora demands other sacrifices. Stephen Cameron (Nigel Patrick) wants to marry her and takes her for a spin in his beloved racing car, saying he would do anything for her. She orders him to push the car off a cliff. He does so without a second thought. Pandora peers over the edge, watching her namesake sink into the sea, then rolls onto her back in satisfaction, Gardner’s ecstatic face taking up a third of the frame.

A woman so selfish could never feel anything as selfless as love. Yet she does, drawn into a bond with Hendrik which eclipses all else. When she confesses her love for him, the story of Pandora’s awakening isn’t in what she says: it’s in Gardner’s eyes.

Musing on the events unfolding around him, Geoffrey says: “We live in a time that has no legends. We live in a time that has no faith.” Pandora and the Flying Dutchman asks for that faith. It asks us to surrender to a world of swooning romance, where the impossible is possible and the measure of love is what you are willing to give up for it.