Have you ever seen a movie that wasn’t good, but beautiful? I suppose I’ve seen a few1: they all seem to have the same flaw. They’re too interested in being cinema, usually at the expense of story.
The 1951 Ava Gardner vehicle Pandora and the Flying Dutchman fits into this category, and a few others besides. It’s part bootleg Hemingway, part pale Powell and Pressburger imitation, part Somerset Maugham-and-water. There are many lofty conversations about life, death, faith, and expatriotism—a character2 commits suicide early on basically out of boredom3, and says as much. His death is received with the same dreamlike disinterest as every other melodramatic flourish in the script, and there are plenty. But there’s one genre Pandora belongs to more than the rest. It is an Ava Gardner movie.
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