Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A lot of fun.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

I've always liked both Ava Gardner and James Mason, who, together, form a memorable duo. However, the movie wastes their considerable talent and star quality. "Pandora" is a singularly overheated take on the Flying Dutchman legend, overflowing with colour ! passion ! thrills ! romance ! music ! exotic scenery ! (I'm adding the exclamation marks because, basically, this is what the movie itself does, all of the time.) "Pandora" is not only overheated, it is also deeply confused. You get large dollops of Christian religion and theology, ancient myth, musings about Feminity, famous poetry and so on : it is all thrown together without much taste or discernment.Some suspense, or some sense of suspense, might have helped, but sadly the title and the first ten minutes or so give away most of both plot AND ending. (Who makes this kind of weird decisions ? It's pretty much like making a movie about a blind and shy heiress who finds true love in the arms of a lesbian war veteran, and then calling your movie "The story of a blind and shy heiress who finds true love in the arms of a lesbian war veteran".)There is a lot of colour in the movie, both in a factual and in a "couleur locale" sense. As befits a nicely overheated movie shot in Spain, the viewer is treated to a full collection of clichés about Spain : bull fighting, matadors, Catholicism, knives, fiery tempers, gypsies, ominous predictions above cards announcing "Death". It's somewhat like Bizet's "Carmen", minus the wit, imagination and relevance.I'm still throwing the movie five stars - but this is mainly because I like both Gardner and Mason. We've all got our weaknesses...A small cultural note : here in Belgium too we are familiar with the "Flying Dutchman" legend. However, the version I've heard was quite different from the one shown in the movie. In this version, the captain of a ship was punished for sailing (meaning working) on a Good Friday, which should be a universally respected day of rest and meditation. He is now doomed to navigate his impious ship for all eternity...

A British fantasy-drama draws inspiration from the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ghost-ship can never approach port and is doomed to sail forever in the sea, and revamped by writer/director Albert Lewin into a lachrymose romance between a Dutch captain, the selfsame Flying Dutchman, Hendrick van der Zee (Mason), and a drop-dead gorgeous Pandora Reynolds (Gardner), in a fictitious port town Esperanza, Spain.Pandora is surrounded by admirers, some of them are expatriate Britons, one of them even gulps a poisoned wine and kills himself in the occasion of the first anniversary their acquaintance, to the dismay of her indifference, and she doesn't even care to raise an eyebrow. However, an unremitting British racing driver Stephen Cameron (Patrick) almost wins her over by pushing his state-of-the- art racing car over the cliff just to prove his undying love, because Pandora calculates the measurement of love by how much a man can give up for loving her (soon she will discover what she has to give up for love as well). They are engaged! But there is an "almost", it is clear as day that she doesn't love Stephen, or any other man, including the spunky torero Juan Montalvo (Cabré).Can she ever love somebody after being created as a perfect specimen of female desirability? Only in the fantasy, maybe, so one night, beckoned by a mysterious ship anchored near the beach, Pandora swims to the ship and finds Hendrick, the sole being on board, is uncannily drawing a painting (a work made by Lewin's friend Man Ray) with exact her image, there are connections between them far beyond this life, as it will reveal, Hendrick is a perpetual wandering soul on the sea, under the curse that only a woman who is willing to die for him because of uncontaminated, unconditional love, can he be set free from the eternity of exile for his blasphemy and spur-of-the- moment sin. Here, the whole foolish and intrinsically jaundiced perspective of treating beautiful women as the ultimate sacrifice to assuage men's guilty over their own idiotic wrongdoings, is ghastly behind our times, which tolls the death knell for this otherwise handsomely and picturesquely shot piece of supernatural romance in Technicolor by cinematographer Jack Cardiff, its close cousin should be William Dieterle's PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1948).The opening, has already given away the forbidding end, and the film is mostly narrated by Pandora's friend, a British archaeologist Geoffrey Fielding (Warrender), who is in the safe age range to stay as a bystander with a morally superior eye, and sometimes by Hendrick himself, to cursorily introduce his past to viewers, those orations are ornate and over-literary, James Mason has been ill-fitted for the role, dour, ponderous and a complete misfit for Ms. Gardner's glamour turn, but as it always the case, whether it is Clark Gable in John Ford's MOGAMBO (1953), or Richard Burton in John Huston's THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964), Gardner can hardly find an equal worth her divine beauty and unrestrained candour, she is Pandora in real life, that's a tailor- made role of her no doubt, but the movie only resounds with a disappointing meh, no torrid flamenco, record-breaking car-racing, or corrida extravaganza can save the damp squib.

Just to point out to anyone in the UK,a new restored DVD version of this movie is available from 31st January 2011. I have purchased this from Amazon,and can assure you that it truly IS restored (colour & sound)to the original Technicolor version. For the completists it also has several extras,but if you want to know what they are you will have to look on Amazon. Make sure the DVD you order is on the Park Circus label, as this is the restored one,any others may not be. I got mine(Feb 2011) for £10.99,as I had been waiting for an "original & restored" version for a long time I was even better value!PS:~ I presume this also available in the States but I am not sure?

I like to see giddy romantic movies where those on screen lives beyond my wildest dreams, or the wildest dreams of most people. A perfectly delicious and contentedly cruel Pandora (Ava Gardner) here lives the great life, she has both the world land speed record holder and Spain's champion bullfighter after her, both of whom she treats callously. She's a heart-breaker with more than one suicide under her belt no doubt. She lives in Esperanza in Southern Spain, where near dusk there are soul-stirring pine-silhouetted coastlines, with turquoise beams from littoral white-sanded patches mesmerising. Though cruel she's not stupid, she's definitely perceptive emotionally and intellectually, perhaps she may be termed an ethical egoist, or Randian. In any case a very interesting character.The central message of the film which is very potent is that, "The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it". For The Flying Dutchman, his Lazarus-like wandering of the globe can only be stopped by his falling in love with a woman who is prepared to die for him.The movie tries to portray itself as quite clever but at times falters, with a classics professor who cannot pronounce "Phoenician", and quotations from the Ruba'iyat that are a little screwy in terms of context. Additionally the Dutchman's explanation of his painting, which is a clear Di Chirico pastiche (something of a directorial trait following the Gauguin pastiche in The Moon and the Sixpence), sounds less than authoritative. Pandora's response to the Dutchman quoting the ending of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach suggests that she hadn't fully grasped it, and he only half-grasped.On the other hand Marius Goring, who is underused, gets a good line from Webster's The Duchess of Malfi: "I know death hath ten thousand several doors / For men to take their exits; and 'tis found / They go on such strange geometrical hinges, / You may open them both ways" It probably helps if you understand that the last line is a reference to suicide versus involuntary death, which requires Dover Notes for me, and perhaps most viewers! Statues recovered from the sea remind one of the beautiful Artemision Bronze, hauled out of the Med during the era in which the movie is set. Archaeologist Geoffrey Fielding is a rather odd sort, buried amongst books and inscriptions and bizarrely aloof from the tempestuous desires of the other characters, though not out of ignorance.The occasional pseudo-literacy is perhaps at one with what is a Technicolor delirium, a film that maintains its giddiness throughout. And yet although the film is quite the most outrageous love story, Lewin does provide a brief counterpoint, when John Laurie's mechanic, quite wonderfully cocks a toast to Sheila's Sims' Janet when she epically denounces Pandora's way of life at a celebratory dinner.A feature of Technicolor films, which is always nice to see, is that the directors generally didn't take colour for granted. One trick to show off the Technicolor wares is to have grandiose flower arrangements in the movies, here in Pandora's home. I think the green-gold lining of her cloak is an unusual colour that really ravished the screen. Actually the film is rather erotic at one point (although Fielding's description of the full moon as erotic at one point is quite titter-worthy, mainly due to delivery), just after said cloak is jettisoned and Pandora swims out to the Dutchman's yacht, naked as the day she was born.The scenes that will remain in my head the most are probably the shots of revelry (coming after the Laurie toast). I think there's something quite Elysian about them, transporting even. The movie manages despite many absurdities (the Dutchman has a 17th century photograph) to hold together well, even with the central absurdity, which is that the love that Pandora has for Hendrik van der Zee, is basically groundless, we're never even shown how it came about.