Albert Lewin is a name I wish more people knew. He was a genius, good at everything, smart as can be, and so talented it makes your head spin. A lot of people wanted to make literary or painterly cinema, he was the man who actually seemed to make movies out of oil paint and romantic poetry. Even now to watch his movies is to fall under a spell, to succumb to lust and impossible longing.

Based on the legend that inspired Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman,” “Pandora” has the doomed-to-wander sea captain cast anchor off the coast of a picturesque Spanish town, circa 1930. On shore and mad with desire, the men of the expat community are metaphorically sipping champagne from the slipper of the Indiana-born American singer, Pandora Reynolds (Gardner).... Albert Lewin’s gloriously Technicolor modern myth “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” is almost unique — a staid yet outlandish star-vehicle that is also an exercise in by the book surrealism.

Albert Lewin's 1951 film is a heady stew: part folk-myth, part deranged love story, part flamenco documentary – it's one of those unclassifiable efforts that threaten permanently to topple over the edge of ridiculousness, but somehow manage to avoid it. Told through the punctilious tones of archaelogist Geoffrey Fielding (Harold Warrender), this has James Mason as a sort of immortal drifter, waiting for the woman who will lift the curse of eternal damnation, and Ava Gardner as a temptress (whose name comes out of a very different school of mythology) whose cruel, using ways melt at one glance of Mason's oh-so-bruised and tormented eyes.

Albert Lewin produced, directed and did the story and script, keeping this film on an almost unrelieved level of sombre depression.