This is the sort of intoxicated, mythic romance rarely seen in Britain or Hollywood. It is a tribute from the latter’s defiantly literate maverick, Albert Lewin, to the former’s Powell and Pressburger. Using the hallucinatorally vivid colours of their cinematographer Jack Cardiff and a couple of their stock players (Marius Goring, John Laurie), Lewin’s 1951 film is set in Spain “about 20 years ago”, under an “erotic and disturbing” moon, outside its Anglo-American leads’ normal place. When a mysterious Dutchman (James Mason, pictured below) moors off shore, events move outside time, too.
The lurid red lipstick of Pandora (Ava Gardner) could have lured his boat in like a wreckers’ beacon. The first half-hour is a tribute to Gardner, too. Hollywood’s most lustrously beautiful, felinely erotic actress of the postwar years is in her 20s here, in a star-making role. Cardiff’s camera adores her profile, before she turns her whole face. Within minutes, Goring has fatally gulped poison over her, and Malcolm Campbell-style speed-driver Geoffrey has tipped his hand-built car over a cliff on her bored command. She responds by stripping to swim to the mysterious ship that has recently appeared, as the stiff Englishmen around her joke about the legend of the Flying Dutchman.
Writer-director Lewin risks absurdity, as when Mason, helping translate a 16th-century manuscript supposedly written by the Flying Dutchman, slips into 16th-century costume in flashback, and we learn of his curse to roam the seas unless he finds a love willing to die for him. When he stalks away from the book, still reciting words he knows only too well, the magic of a myth walking in the near-present in a well-cut suit returns.
George Sanders was a favourite Lewin actor, and Mason shares his urbane weariness, adding dark glamour to match Gardner's. The supposedly cerebral Lewin stages superb action scenes around them – a land-speed record attempt in a burning car, a fatal bullfight. The eternal yearning of his lovers burns through it all.
