Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Pandora and the Flying Dutchman |
| Original title | Pandora and the Flying Dutchman |
| Country of production | England |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1951 |
| length | 123 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Albert Lewin |
| script | Albert Lewin |
| production | Joseph Kaufman, Albert Lewin |
| music | Alan Rawsthorne |
| camera | Jack Cardiff , Ted Scaife |
| cut | Ralph Kemplen |
| occupation | |
| |
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a film drama by Albert Lewin that combines the legend of the Flying Dutchman with the figure of Pandora from Greek mythology (in the embodiment of a " femme fatale "). The film was produced by Dorkay Productions / Romulus Film and was released by MGM on October 15, 1951 in US cinemas (Germany August 11, 1953, France September 19, 1951).
The work is now considered a cult film and impresses not only with the saturated technicolor shots by the cameraman Jack Cardiff, but also with the literary demands of the script.
The American director Lewin was a former English teacher trained at Harvard who was a close confidante and private secretary of Irving Thalberg at MGM in the 1930s , then worked as a producer at Paramount and made his own films as a director from 1942.
action
In the fall of 1930, in the fictional Spanish coastal town of Esperanza, the bodies of a man and a woman who appear to be holding hands in death were washed ashore. Next to them is an open volume of poetry. In several flashbacks, the narrator Geoffrey, apparently an archaeologist or historian, then looks back on the past six months:
Nightclub singer Pandora is the adored centerpiece of a small group of Anglo-American friends. All men are in love with her (like racing driver Stephen Cameron and Spanish bullfighter Montalvo); but she is bored with them, holds them off and ultimately means ruin for many (such as Reggie Demarest and the bullfighter Montalvo, who ultimately lose their lives for their sake). Pandora repeats a quote from Geoffrey that the measure of love is what someone is willing to sacrifice for it, whereupon Cameron drives his racing car over the cliffs for her sake. She agrees to marry him on September 3rd of that year.
The yacht of the mysterious Dutchman Hendrick van der Zee, which anchored off the coast on the evening of March 9th, aroused Pandora's curiosity. That same night she swims out to his yacht on a whim and sees through a window how van der Zee paints a picture whose central figure, the mythological Pandora , closely resembles her. In the following period, Pandora gradually falls in love with van der Zee, but continues to make all the preparations for the wedding with Stephen.
In a flashback - van der Zee translates an old Dutch manuscript for Geoffrey - it turns out that this is the Flying Dutchman, once a ship's captain in the Spanish Netherlands , who stabbed his apparently unfaithful wife in an affect because of his excessive arrogance and indignation God is condemned not to be able to die, but in the worst case to sail around the earth with his ship until the Last Judgment , in search of a woman who is both faithful and beautiful, and ready to die for him, that him Realize the importance of love. Every seven years he is allowed to go ashore and stand among mortals in search of this woman. That this is the Flying Dutchman becomes clear to Geoffrey from the fact that van der Zee can recite entire passages of the manuscript by heart. In the flashback of the Dutchman's memories, the viewer also recognizes that Pandora is completely like his former wife.
The haughty bullfighter Montalvo, who also wants to win Pandora for himself, has his mother, a gypsy, predicting death from the cards, but he ignores her warnings. He suspects that Pandora's affection is actually van der Zee, but makes her a marriage proposal, which she refuses. At night he visits van der Zee and stabs him out of jealousy. Some time afterwards, however, van der Zee gets up again, since he cannot die, and appears in the middle of a bullfight that Montalvo is fighting and which Pandora and her friends are also watching. Montalvo, who believed van der Zee dead, is so upset by the sight of him that the bull takes him by the horns several times and later that day succumbs to his injuries in a nearby monastery. Before that, he confesses and tells Pandora on his deathbed that he stabbed van der Zee. This is strangely touched.
When van der Zees asked in a nocturnal conversation whether Pandora would sacrifice her life for him, she said yes; In response to the question of what he would be willing to give up for them, he calls the redemption from his fate. Out of love, he suddenly starts an argument and announces the imminent departure of his ship before Pandora's wedding to Stephen. On the eve of their wedding, Geoffrey gave Pandora the translation of the Dutch manuscript on the Flying Dutchman to read. During the night, Pandora swims out to the yacht van der Zees, which was still held in the harbor by a calm. They speak of their love for one another, time seems to stand still; the ship sinks in a sudden thunderstorm. The two bodies also drive a volume of poetry that Geoffrey had lent the Dutchman and which he "gives back" in this way.
Others
- The film was shot mainly in Tossa de Mar, Catalonia on the Costa Brava (as well as other places there such as Girona ) and at Shepperton Studios in London.
- Ava Gardner also sings How Am I to Know . You´re driving me crazy can also be heard .
- Mario Cabré was actually a well-known bullfighter before retiring from the arena and turning to acting.
- James Mason's then wife Pamela can be seen in a supporting role.
- The sailor's song of the “ghost crew” of the flying Dutchman was replaced in the German synchronization by a sequence of notes that is supposed to suggest an unearthly atmosphere, whereby the motif of the song, which is taken up in several places in the film music, loses its reference.
Literary references
The 1867 Dover Beach poem quoted in the film is by Matthew Arnold :
"The sea of faith was once, too, at the full
and round earth's shore
...
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."
Several times, at the beginning and at the end of the film, lines from the Rubaiyat by Omar Chayyām in the translation by Edward FitzGerald are reproduced:
"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
criticism
"A delightful, atmospherically dense film."
While the film was generally too pretentious to English critics, it was hailed by French critics, where critics such as Ado Kyrou of the Cahiers du Cinema suggested a connection with the surrealists ( L'Âge d'Or by Luis Bunuel or Salvador Dalí ) . Lewin himself admitted a surrealist influence, he was friends with Man Ray and Max Ernst and collected their art. Man Ray also made the stills of Ava Gardner and created the likeness of the mythological Pandora for the film.
“A woman unable to love and a man unable to die - a baroque synthesis of classical myth and Germanic legend set in Spain around 1930” (“A woman who is unable to love and a man who is unable to die - one Baroque synthesis of a classical myth and a Germanic legend transferred to Spain in 1930 ”), Susan Felleman in Botticelli in Hollywood - the Films of Albert Lewin , 1997
"Lewin's extraordinary film [...] combines a script of exuberant literacy with a visual splendor often bordering on the surreal." ("Lewin's extraordinary film [...] combines a literarily exuberant script with a visual radiance that often borders on the unreal"), Richard Rayner in Time Out
"A masterpiece of unconscious kitsch, a film as monstrously, adorably, munificently bad as any that I've seen" ("A masterpiece of subconscious kitsch, a film that is as monstrous, admirable and generous as anyone else, I've ever seen ”), Alexander Walker 1985
" Pandora achieves a feverish, dreamlike quality, with its eerie landscapes - forced perspectives littered by fragments of classical statuary, derived from de Chirico's surrealist paintings - flashbacks within flashbacks and elevated language. […] It should be kitsch, and yet Pandora carries such conviction that it achieves a kind of crazy grandeur […] ”(“ With its eerie landscapes, Pandora achieves forced perspectives in which fragments of classical statues are scattered, those from the surrealist Painting of de Chirico could come from - flashbacks within flashbacks and his sublime language a feverish, dream-like quality [...] It [the film] should be kitsch, and yet Pandora is of such persuasive power that it exudes a certain insane grandeur [...] "), Dave Kehr, Mythic Mash-Up in Feverish Color , 2010
"Mr. Mason gets very little help from Miss Gardner, whose acting consists of a series of star poses, or indeed from a script of quite incredible pretentiousness which every now and again demands that Mr. Mason recite what Miss Gardner persists in calling 'a pome' " , London Times, 1951 (“Mr. Mason has very little help with Miss Gardner, whose play consists of a series of poses by a star, as well as with the script, which is incredibly presumptuous and occasionally requires Mr. Mason to recite what Miss Gardner persistently likes to call 'pome fruit'. ")
The observer's critic , CA Lejeune, who moreover predicted that the film would have disappeared from the collections of every connoisseur in a few years, 1951: “I'm sorry to think that our country will be blamed for its inadequacy: in the technical sense the thing is undoubtedly British, but in a deeper sense it is no more British or European than the samba, the jukebox or the rye highball. ”(“ It is a pity that our country will be blamed for its inadequacy: in the technical sense this matter is undoubtedly British, but not more British or European than the Samba, the Jukebox or the Rye Highball. ")
Web links
Notes and sources
- ^ Dover Beach
- ↑ Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 26, 2020 .
- ↑ quoted from Sheridan Morley Odd man out , p. 92. Alexander Walker (1930-2003) was a well-known British film critic, from 1960 on the London Evening Standard.
- ↑ quoted from Sheridan Morley Odd man out - James Mason , Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1989, p. 91
- ↑ The swipe applied to Gardner's pronunciation of the word ( poem = poem, pome = pome )
- ↑ a cocktail made from whiskey and ginger ale
- ^ Morley, p. 91