Watch Pandora and the Flying Dutchman For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

Wow! Such a good movie.

A Brilliant Conflict

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

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.

This is how a friend of mine began to describe "Pandora" to me on our way to school on an early morning in the spring of 1986. Two 12-year-old kids talking about a 35-year-old movie. Does this kind of thing ever happen today? I wonder. My friend had seen the movie. I hadn't; my mum and I had been watching another program on a different channel instead. So I asked my pal to give me a full account of this "weird" movie as he called it. I was much intrigued...What he told me then about a strange guy who was dead but alive, another guy with a racing car and who was half crazy, a bullfighter who was even crazier, and a saucy girl in the middle of all this mess, stood on my mind for years and years... I finally had a chance to see the film, seventeen years later, on British TV. I loved it!One of my favourite actors of all time: James Mason. One of the most beautiful and talented actresses of all time: Ava Gardner.The greatest work of one of the greatest cinematographers of all time: Jack Cardiff. One of the greatest opening lines in a movie ever: "When I first met Hendrick van der Zee it never occurred to me that he was not an ordinary man..." And one of the very first foreign films ever shot in Spain. And perhaps the greatest romantic love story ever filmed.

The leads in "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" are one of the few aspects of this movie that are good. James Mason fits perfectly in the mysterious role of the fictitious Captain Hendrik van der Zee. And, the alluring Ava Gardner is the perfect siren. The color is marvelous especially in the scenic shots along the Costa Brava of Spain. But that ends the glowing things I can say about this film. The plot comes right out of left field. It's a weird hodgepodge of a 17th century seaman's legend, Greek mythology, ancient Persian writing and mysticism, an unknown quotable source, and modern escapades. With such a mess for a story, one wouldn't expect the writing, directing, screenplay and editing to be very good or to salvage the movie. And they aren't and don't. From the number of reviews I've seen that are all aglow about this film, I can only surmise that most people are taken in by a supposed love story, and that that blinds them to everything else in the movie, however strange, nonsensical and unintelligible. Had the movie makers stuck to the single myth and revised it some, they could have had an enjoyable vehicle for a good love story. The original Flying Dutchman myth was of a ship that went down with all hands in a storm off Cape Horn. It came back as a ghost ship destined to sail the seas forever and never put into port. That was in the 17th century. That story has been revised over time, to where the captain of the vessel was Hendrik van der Zee. But that's where all similarity to that myth ends in this film. In the revised legend for the film, Hendrik escaped hanging after he killed his faithful wife for suspected infidelity. Presumably, he learned of her faithfulness during his trial for murder. So, now, he is condemned to sail the oceans for eternity. But he is able to put into port once every seven years; and should he find a woman who would love him to the point of giving up her life for him, he would then be released of his eternal wandering. Now, it seems to me that this was enough of a story on which to build a very good screenplay for this film. And, all of that could have been accomplished in about 40 minutes fewer than this two-hour plus film. I can't image what possessed the movie makers to turn this into the convoluted mixture of myth and invention that they did. But it sure doesn't make sense, and it doesn't hold together well. So, the movie adds Greek mythology and Pandora's box – the painting Hendrik is doing in his cabin. Pandora's box was supposed to contain all the evils of the world. What had that to do with story so far? How did something from 2,000 years earlier all of a sudden become part of a 17th century legend? Apparently, the Flying Dutchman went back in time to ancient Greece and somehow involved the Greed gods in his plight. Then the film adds lines of a poem in the book, "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." I think they were stepping off the deep end here. They just added another red herring in the plot. What a Persian poet's "wisdom" about not erasing a word that has been written has to do with this story is beyond me. Finally, the story adds a bullfighter and bull fight, and a race car driver and a record speed run. The latter are love pursuers and pursuits of the siren, Pandora. So, now we have a love quadrangle involving the modern Pandora. Only she is a woman who is the opposite of the Flying Dutchman's faithful wife. She is an apparent seducer of many men. At least, according to the dialog. The result of all this is a dark, confused, disconnected story of mixed myths and inventions. I suppose that's why the writers created the character of Geoffrey as a narrator. He explains what's going on to we viewers throughout the film. But he also adds further to the confusion. In an opening scene, we hear him say out loud to himself: "The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it. Who said that?" he asks. He repeats it and explains to others that he had read it somewhere but couldn't recall where. He thought that maybe it was Greek. We never do hear where it came from. And, my extensive search of reference books and the Web didn't find it either. Here's one way they could have had an intelligible fantasy story. Throw out the Persian poetry book, the lines that have to do with the measure of love, and eliminate much of the love competition between Stephen Cameron (played by Nigel Patrick) and Juan Montalvo (played by Mario Cabré). The bull fight and car speed tests have nothing to do with the story of the fatal attraction between the two leads. Then, the role of the narrator could be eliminated and we would have a tight enough story that viewers would have been able to make sense of it without the narration.My five stars are for the good acting overall, especially that of Mason and Gardner; and for the setting, scenery and production aspects of the film. But the long, drawn-out fairy-tale story of mixed fantasies was more muddled than mysterious, and the finished product was an incoherent jumble of red herrings tossed into a love quadrangle.

From the pages of the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die I found this title, I wrongly assumed it was going to be a foreign film, perhaps a fantasy or mythology based story, but I was looking forward to whatever it would entail, from director Albert Lewin (The Picture of Dorian Gray). Basically, set in 1930, in the small Catalan port of Esperanza fishermen discover the bodies of a man and a woman in their nets, police and resident archaeologist Geoffrey Fielding (Harold Warrender) are at the scene, and returning home Geoffrey tells the story of these two dead people as he makes sense of the events that lead to their deaths. Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner) is an American nightclub singer and femme fatale who has many men who believe they love her, but she is unable to love anyone, and these admirers she often tests their devotion to her, including Reggie Demarest (Marius Goring) who commits suicide drinking poisoned wine for her, but she seems to show no reaction. Land speed record holder Stephen Cameron (Nigel Patrick) is her latest admirer, but she says she will only marry him if he sacrifices his treasured racing car by pushing it off a cliff into the sea, but she is curious to know the captain of a yacht that has sailed into Esperanza. One night she swims out to the yacht, and inside she finds Dutch captain Hendrik Van Der Zee (James Mason), he is painting a picture of a woman who bares a striking resemblance to her, and he is calling her Pandora, representing the mythological Greek legend, and as with other men he finds himself falling for the American woman and moves to a hotel on the land to spend more time with her. Geoffrey and Hendrick become friends and collaborate to identify local finds, they even find a notebook from the 16th Century, it was written in Dutch by Hendrick, who is revealed to be the accursed Flying Dutchman, he murdered his wife who he believed was unfaithful, his loss led to blasphemy and his death sentence, but before his execution a spirit showed him his wife was innocent, ghosts were all over the ship, and he was cursed to endlessly sail the seas until he finds a woman who loves and is willing to die for him, and to this day he appears every seven years to try and find this woman. Pandora is in love with Van Der Zee, but he does not want her to die so he does everything he can to make her hate him, and meanwhile she has bullfighter Juan Montalvo (Mario Cabré) to gain her affection, he even murders Hendrick in jealousy, but after leaving Hendrick is alive as if nothing happened, and the next day he turns up at a bullfight, where Juan is so shocked to see him he ignores the bull and gets fatally wounded by it, he explains the murder to Pandora before dying, she is confused. It comes to the day of her wedding to Stephen, but Pandora wants to know from Geoffrey the translations of the notebook, and now she knows the truth she swims out the yacht again, and he reveals that the painting is done from memory, he was married to Pandora in her past reincarnation, she is his chance to lift his punishment, but it would mean her dying, but ultimately he accepts her love and they embrace, but of course fate takes them went a fierce storm turns the yacht over, and the next morning Hendrick and Pandora's bodies are found, destiny has been fulfilled and the curse has been lifted. Also starring Sheila Sim as Janet, John Laurie as Angus, Pamela Mason, James's then wife as Jenny, Patricia Raine as Peggy and Margarita D'Alvarez as Senora Montalvo. Gardner is beautiful looking but obviously has her inability to truly love any man until she finds the unlikely one, Mason is good as the mysterious man who is later revealed to be a cursed sailor who does not want his love to be hurt by his punishment, it is an interesting story of legend mixing with strangeness, it may be a bit barmy and an acquired taste for modern audiences, but it is certainly a most watchable romantic fantasy drama. Very good!