I did a rave about PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN a while back, Albert Lewin's fantastically styled delirious surreal swoonsome melodrama from 1951. Yesterday a friend and I saw it again on the big screen at a special matinee at the local art cinema, and it was a revelation. There is just so much in it to savour - those interiors, Ava's endless supply of amazing dresses and lush close-ups of her. There couldn't have been anyone more beautiful than her then, and James Mason is also magnetic as the mysterious Dutchman whose schooner arrives in that Spanish bay, as the expats enjoy the local culture, headed by playgirl Pandora and her admirers including Marius Goring drinking himself to death and motor racer Nigel Patrick who will send his beloved car over the cliff when Pandora asks him to, and then that bullfigher who wants to eliminate the competition so he can have Pandora to himself - but the Dutchman cannot be got rid of that easily, as Pandora finds out that "the measure of one's love is what one will give up for it". Jack Cardiff's photography is up there with his work on BLACK NARCISSUS. Its a movie one can sink into and watch again just to savour those moments. Its now in my top 20!
A new print of PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, 1950, is the centrepiece of retrospectives on Jack Cardiff and Albert Lewin at London's BFI at the moment (as well as on Agnes Varda - but more on her and Jacques Demy later). Everything about PANDORA is everything that cinema should be - unlike say that drearily predictable new Robin Hood of Crowe and Scott! From that lush Technicolor and Cardiff's way with lighting Ava Gardner and James Mason in their swooning romanticism; I found myself pausing several scenes just to take in the astonishing detail and those great Cardiff shots (as in that fabulous restaurant scene with the blue sky and Ava in that yellow dress) its very surreal in places ... it has a lot in common actually with Mankiewicz's THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA which Cardiff also lit and photographed in '54. (I've just realised Ava and Mason were Franz Joseph and Elizabeth of Austria [Sissi] in Terence Young's MAYERLING in '68 but can't remember any scenes they had together...it succeeded though in making Deneuve and Sharif pallid and uninteresting, at least Genevieve Page was also briefly on board.)
Albert Lewin was one of Hollywood's eccentric talents with that legacy of fascinating films like the 1945 PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and THE AFFAIRS OF BEL AMI where George Sanders excels, as ever. 
Cardiff - who died in his 90s last year - has related how he shot all those great films in his memoir "Magic Hour": the Powell-Pressburger productions in the '40s, rousing adventures like THE VIKINGS and that Sahara western LEGEND OF THE LOST (where he relates a chaste romance he had with young Sophia Loren (before her marriage to Ponti) and did Marilyn Monroe ever look more adorably beautiful than in THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL? His chapter on Monroe makes all those other books on her redundant.
Cardiff turned to directing himself - his 1960 SONS AND LOVERS has some great black and white photography and is a terrific version of Lawrence with that great pairing of Wendy Hiller and Trevor Howard as the warring parents, and Mary Ure in one of her rare film roles. YOUNG CASSIDY in 1965 - taken over from ailing John Ford - is an adequate version of Sean O'Casey's early life (as depicted by Rod Taylor) and is a grea
t example of American movie-making in England in the '60s with again a superlative cast: Maggie Smith, the radiant young Julie Christie, Edith Evans, Michael Redgrave, Flora Robson, Sian Philips and a lot of familiar Irish faces.