Critics reviews

It’s nutty, literary (quotes from Omar Khayyam) and gorgeously shot by Jack Cardiff. Gardner is indecently radiant.

Only one demerit might be charged against the picture and that is its dalliance, either with beautiful scenery, or mood, or special situation. Off and on the story is halted for peculiar and eccentric excursions of this kind. These sequences are peculiarly interesting and individual in themselves, even though “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” might be a stronger film without them.

Gardner’s a timeless actress, and it’s through her that Pandora and the Flying Dutchman gains its own timelessness. She’s so cool and controlled that any time the film starts tipping over the edge from fantasy to absurdity, her mere presence grounds it.

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.

if PANDORA is a surrealist film, it represents a flabby, middle-aged strain of surrealism. There's no unconscious anywhere in sight--every detail has been deliberated within an inch of its life. The romance between Ava Gardner and James Mason is too mechanistic and rehearsed to qualify as l'amour fou. And yet... there's really nothing else like PANDORA, no film so confident in its high-flown gibberish, no commercial feature so indifferent to its audience.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman treads the line between profound and baloney somewhat awkwardly. But it is great to see a film that has such a sense of the magical without falling into the tweeness...

...One of my all-time favorite examples of Hollywood romanticism, glamor, and lushness (as well as Technicolor)...

What this film does have in common with its contemporaries is a heavy tendency toward sentimentality, especially toward the end. There, the richly saturated photography serves to highlight melodramatic gestures and give them an almost pantomime air.

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.

Lewin brings off the near-impossible task of positing a transcendent love in a sceptical age, succeeding through his own conviction, and indeed because Gardner, in the role of a lifetime, seems as much screen goddess as mere mortal – an apotheosis rendered by cameraman Jack Cardiff in Technicolor so heady it’s the stuff of legend.

Indeed, if it weren't for Mr. Thomas and the warmth that wells up from him, we would not want to voice a speculation as to the residual qualities of the film—not even conceding the wry humor that frequently pops in the script, the verve of the other performers and the nostalgic lushness of the songs.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a Technicolored pastiche of symbolism, the supernatural and old romantic claptrap.