NYFF Opens Albert Lewin’s Magic Box

Though the likely audience favorite among the revivals in the 46th New York Film Festival will be the restored version of Max Ophuls’s “Lola Montès,” an equally glittering cinematic jewel is sure to get audiences talking.As part of Martin Scorsese’s ongoing preservation and presentation work, Albert Lewin’s 1951 romantic fable “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” will unspool at the festival on October 10 in a new print from the George Eastman House. This new edition returns the film’s extravagant Technicolor photography to a state closely approximating its original analog luster.By the time he undertook “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman,” Lewin (1894-1968) had been in Hollywood for two decades. The Brooklyn-born Harvard graduate taught English and served as a theater critic at the Jewish Tribune before relocating to the West Coast to work as a script consultant for Samuel Goldwyn. Lewin’s work with Goldwyn and directors King Vidor and Victor Sjostrom eventually led him to MGM’s story department and a multiyear association with the studio’s sainted “boy wonder,” producer Irving Thalberg. When Lewin began to make films himself in the early 1940s, it was as a writer, director, and producer — a threefold designation that was quite rare in Hollywood’s specialized dream factories.Lewin’s 1945 adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” remains the best big-screen version of Oscar Wilde’s book. And “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” remains one of the most spectacularly realized examples of American movie culture’s mid-century forays into supernatural romance. Like Henry Hathaway’s “Peter Ibbetson” (1935) and William Dieterle’s “Portrait of Jennie” (1948), “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” places romantic love outside of the real (and obtainable) by conjuring a fascination between a narcissistic torch singer named Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner) and Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason), the ghost of a Dutch sea captain cursed to float through time in search of love eternal.Lewin was an art collector and aesthete of some accomplishment. The slowly ebbing Aristotelian remove his film initially enforces between lover and loved suggests something of a wish fulfillment for someone accustomed to the unrequited romance between art appreciator and art object. In any case, Lewin’s behind-the-scenes inspiration for his sumptuously daffy vision clearly included the work of Man Ray and Max Ernst, two artists he collected. Some sources claim that Man Ray himself directly contributed to the film’s design.The real production MVP, however, was the cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Though Mr. Cardiff made his considerable reputation by using Technicolor’s bluntly lurid color palette to realize more impressionistic and muted color schemes than were then the norm in film work, for “Pandora” he willingly jettisoned chromatic self-control.“Most directors who have been around a while have that gaunt, soul-scarred look associated with fighter pilots who have survived a way,” Mr. Cardiff recalled in his memoir “Magic Hour.” Somehow untouched by the ravages of show business, Lewin, according to Mr. Cardiff, “was always cheerful and his sky blue eyes constantly sparkled with humor.” On location on the northeastern Spanish coast, however, Lewin became somewhat fixated on his female star. Mr. Cardiff recalls the film’s continuity supervisor despairing as he had to keep track of the unnecessary close-ups that Lewin took of Gardner. For her part, the star, deep in the throes of her famed off-screen romance with Frank Sinatra, and nervous about appearing in her first color movie, took pains to point out to Mr. Cardiff that she needed to be lit differently depending on where she was in her lunar cycle.The realities of film production notwithstanding, “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” is a heady and delightful Hollywood enchantment that, like its director’s handful of similarly sincere forays into romantic fantasy and fatalism, deserves to be better known than it is. At least for one night, Lewin’s ultimate expression of a magnitude of romance that barely exists on-screen anymore (let alone in the real world) will, thanks to the George Eastman House, Mr. Scorsese, and the New York Film Festival, briefly return from the beyond.

NYFF Opens Albert Lewin’s Magic Box

NYFF Opens Albert Lewin’s Magic Box

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