Albert Lewin’s 1951 fantasy romance stretches credulity, but Jack Cardiff’s cinematography and Ava Gardner’s performance help it cast a spell.

Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

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Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) is among the most insanely premised romantic films I’ve ever seen; you never exactly buy what’s going on. But it also looks so beautiful that it being profoundly nuts eventually takes on an almost incidental quality — something to be aware of but not really bothered by. As shot by Jack Cardiff, who gives the movie a glowy green-gold hue that makes everything appear almost storybookian, and as composed by director Albert Lewin, whose carefully put together tableaux recall those of silent melodramas, the film achieves a look and feel that has an almost-magical quality. It’s befitting for a movie where love becomes a matter of life and death — a transcendent experience with the might to dismantle centuries-old curses. 

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is set during the fall of 1930, in the Spanish port of Esperanza. The Pandora of the title, played by Ava Gardner, is a nightclub singer who’s restaged her act everywhere from London to New York. She’s maybe the best-known woman in this tiny community, though not because of the singing thing and more her preternatural siren’s way of beguiling seemingly every straight man in the area who takes even a look at her. One guy at the beginning of the movie laces his own drink with poison after it’s at last dawned on him that he and Pandora are probably never going to be together. And another, a race-car driver, barely hesitates when Pandora dares him to certify his affection by pushing his favorite car off a cliff. Pandora, in the meantime, hasn’t ever really been in love. It’s hard to fall for someone when everyone who pursues you seems to be too infatuated with your image and their attendant fantasies to act reasonably. It’s a good thing Gardner, who is photographed like she belongs in a museum by Cardiff, was around in 1951 to cast: she really is beautiful enough to persuade us that these men would act so absurdly around her and not have it seem ridiculous. (With Gardner, it may still be ridiculous but makes somewhat more sense.)

In Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, her dry spell will come to an end. Early in the film, she’s actually intrigued for once after boldly swimming to and then hopping aboard — uninvited — a mysterious ship that docks in Esperanza one evening. The captain is a Dutchman named Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason); when he and Pandora first make contact he’s painting what looks like a picture of her, and unusually he makes no attempt at any polite niceties after she introduces herself. 

The film will make clear, to us before it does Pandora, that Hendrick isn’t a run-of-the-mill mortal with bad manners but actually the infamous flying dutchman of old legends. Some four centuries ago, van der Zee murdered his wife (he believed her to be unfaithful, which turned out not actually to be true), and to atone for his sin the universe cursed him to eternally sail the seas. His affliction can only be gotten rid of if he finds a woman who loves him enough to willingly die for him. It’s not very surprising that he hasn’t had much success: the mystical force punishing him only lets him go ashore every seven years, and only for six months at a time. Good luck with that!     

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman wastes no time assuring us Pandora will be the woman to break the curse. The film begins with her and van der Zee’s bodies, tangled together in an embrace, caught in a fishing net, with the movie unraveling from there as a story told to us by an archeologist friend of Pandora’s (Harold Warrender). 

Not once does the romance ever feel genuinely momentous. Gardner and Mason don’t have a lot of chemistry to work with; almost none of the movie has them do anything like dating so that heat can build. (The film pinballs among Pandora’s various romantic entanglements.) When final deliberations are being made we can’t get caught up in the grand gestures because the decision-making is so implausible. 

But because Pandora and the Flying Dutchman has a visual magnificence that extraordinarily conveys the kind of emotion the film wants to evoke but can’t very easily, it’s hard to mind, because all you can think about is how precisely few movies you’ve seen that look so great. (I realized, and then laughed to myself, that the other ones immediately coming to mind — 1947’s Black Narcissus, 1948’s The Red Shoes — also were shot by Cardiff: he wields his camera the way Chopin’s fingers might have glided across his favorite piano.) Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’s subject matter is probably impossible to dramatize without it seeming unbearably unconvincing, but Lewin, his cinematographer, and Gardner’s next-level screen presence do what’s likely the very best job that could be done.