#harold warrender

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Have you seen Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)?

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Voting ended onJul 14, 2025

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Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

“No work of art is complete until the element of chance has entered into it,” says James Mason as Dutch sea captain Hendrik van der Zee. By that reckoning, Albert Lewin’s PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951, DVD, but make sure it’s the 2020 restoration) is a very incomplete work of art. Although it’s intellectually intriguing and beautifully shot, at times the picture’s meticulous planning overshadows anything else on screen. It often seems less filmed than embalmed.

Pandora (Ava Gardner) is a free-living, often destructive playgirl and cabaret singer vacationing along the Spanish Riviera. She’s in charge of her life and those around her until she meets Mason, whose gloominess fascinates her. That spells trouble for the two men in love with her, her fiancé (Harold Warrender), a British racecar designer, and a temperamental matador (Mario Cabré). There’s one more complication. Mason is the Flying Dutchman of legend, doomed to sail the seas until he can find a woman willing to sacrifice her life for him.

The film is beautiful to behold, even in the muddy print sold by Kino International. Jack Cardiff did the Technicolor cinematography and captures the beauty of the Mediterranean. Man Ray, who was a friend of Lewin’s, contributed some design elements, and you can feel his influence in the constant presence of classical statuary along the shore, particularly during a party that drifts outside. Visually it’s quite fascinating watching people dance among the carved figures, At one point, a jazz musician plays while lying back against a half-buried statue. And Beatrice Dawson did some eye-popping gowns for Gardner, who’s at her most ravishing here.

But the whole thing looks as it were planned out down to the last gesture. There’s something ponderous about it that’s not helped by the 122-minute running time. A flashback to the story of the Flying Dutchman seems to go on forever as Mason narrates the events in copious detail. Lewin was a very literate director who specialized in adaptations of elegant writers like Oscar Wilde and W. Somerset Maugham. This was the first original script he directed, but he’s still in love with words, at times using voiceovers to tell us things we can see already. It doesn’t feel as if he trusts his actors, and you may be tempted to shout “shut up” at the screen as they go on. Mason and Nigel Patrick (as an archaeologist who seems coded as a gay man) can work within that. Marius Goring has a great cameo early on as a suitor killing himself for love of Gardner. But Cabré, who’s really not an actor, can’t bring Lewin’s conception of his character to life. His constant scowling is almost comic. And Gardner also suffers, partly because her character isn’t really a woman. She’s a man’s concept of the ideal woman. She has agency at the start as she juggles her various suitors, but it’s depicted as something destructive. She lets Goring commit suicide and demands Warrender prove his love for her by destroying the racecar he’s spent two years building. She can only achieve purity by giving up agency and sacrificing herself for Mason. That’s a supremely romantic idea, at least for some straight men. But it’s so sparely written, Gardner doesn’t have a lot to play with. I missed the feisty woman who brought life to everything from film noirs to Hollywood musicals to Tennessee Williams. Perhaps the greatest sin Lewin commits in this film is making her seem a little dull.

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Scott of the Antarctic (1948) Charles Frend

December 30th 2024

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Conspirator, 1949, Is Playing on TCM on May 15 (USA)

Conspirator, 1949, is rarely shown on TV.  It will show on Turner Classic Movies on Monday, May 15 at 8:00 a.m.  This is the first film Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor made together. Most of the anti-Communist films of the 1940s – 1950s are crap. No doubt about that. Thrown together they had preposterous plots emanating from the Kremlin to sap our national resources or strength. For example…

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