A beautiful woman on a hot evening in the remote port of Esperanza somewhere on the Spanish main. Ava Gardner, possibly the most beautiful woman ever created, plays Pandora, a woman with the power to make men drop dead from futile devotion, the ultimate femme fatale, in fact, arriving at the very turning point of film noir in cinema history.
Ava Gardner is Pandora, but she is also a kind of Ingrid Bergman in Rick's, waiting and waiting for a man to arrive so she can get out of there, languorous, bored, worldweary. No man has ever managed to make her fall in love. She wonders if they ever will and is vaguely intrigued by the men who fall for her, and trails them along, perhaps to see if they will 'turn' her. But none do, until Captain Hendrik van der Zee's boat sails into the harbour.
James Mason is Captain van der Zee. He is also, it turns out, the Flying Dutchman, mythic Hollander cursed to sail the seas interminably until he can find a woman who will love him and that means die for him. An unlikely match: but we know it's going to happen, the two will pair up, because this is a movie and it's in Technicolor, and in the opening 'flash-forward' scene we watched as fishermen dragged up in their nets the bodies of a drowned couple...
In the first scenes of the film proper, Pandora's latest devotee, Reggie Demerast, almost dead from drinking, proposes to her and is rejected. He pops tablets into his own drink and swallows: it's poison! While she lazily pretends to play the piano, he pirouettes and drops like a stone.
As friends gather round, Sheila Sims accuses Pandora of heartlessness to which she responds with cool cynicism: she cannot be blamed for what men do to themselves in pursuit of her.
The film's literariness is unusual: it not only lards the story with mythic overtones but the script is written with ornate theatricality and some depth, which for the absurdity of the surface antics has Powell and Pressburger tendencies: superficially preposterous, but uncannily deep.
Shot in Technicolor by Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus, Red Shoes, Black Rose), faces alter subtly from orange to yellow to green and back again: Technicolor introduces another preposterous tendency, but one which magicalises the image and makes it spellbinding. For religious reasons I try to avoid films that are not in black and white, but Technicolor is another form of black and white - the religious reasons that the film is spellbinding. Technicolor, like black and white, mythologises, though a film like Pandora with its generous helpings of mythologies (Carmen, Wagner, Pandora) hardly needs any help. But it is important to say that this fanciful, wispy looking film actually achieves that very difficult synthesis of realism and mythologism, much as the great Technicolor films of the era also managed to do: the Wizard of Oz, The Red Shoes, Reap The Wild Wind. The colour scheme heightens, amplifies, intensifies and deepens the illusion, resembling not reality - which we want to escape - but the dreams we would like to have. This romanticism is somehow missing from modern mythologies, say, the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter series where the blend of realism and artifice somehow leads to pomposity, earnestness, heavyhandedness and silliness, all of the things you would expect of films like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman but are somehow lead away from by the seriousness and depth of the thought and reading that has gone into the script.
Godard said we look up at cinema-screen while we look down at television.