I Can Command the Sails but Not the Wind

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)
directed by Albert Lewin
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Dreamlike, exotic, and deeply romantic, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman might also be one of the most deliberately paced movies I've seen. It runs at just two hours, and tells the story of a woman in a Mediterranean town in Spain who compels men to impossible sacrifices on her beautiful behalf. Bullfighters, race car drivers, and the fabled Dutchman of old ghost tales line up to walk the dock beside her, and although Ava Gardner had been in movies for ten years at this point, she hasn't looked this beautiful in any film that I can recall.

Part of it is Technicolor, I'm sure, which captures the twinkling lights of homes on the surrounding hills as well as the surf near the boat in the harbor with impossible delicacy. So many scenes are night scenes, and Gardner is very nearly an apparition, though the point is that someone so flesh and blood could only exist for a short and specific length of time. Had the movie been made a decade prior, it would be in black and white and run an hour and a half. But Lewin makes room for silence, as if each of his characters is caught in an ancient spell. He gives them lovely things to say, about love and lost hours, and counts off heartbeats to match Gardner's softest, most languorous delivery.

It is unlike nearly anything else I've watched, and though not quite a ghost story, it secures the position of open water, traveling winds, and a window from which to watch them as the three likeliest ingredients for a successful myth and sad story of regret. I can't believe that I once thought Technicolor did no service to real life - the images here are like standing in blue water and gazing at shipwrecks on the bottom of the sea.