Dennis Hollingsworth

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

"The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it..."

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was made in Tossa de Mar in 1951, it was the first Hollywood movie made in Spain... during Franco's Spain, and remarkable it was because it included the Catalan language during a time where the signs in the streets were not yet faded that told the locals to "speak Castellano and not the language of dogs" (I paraphrase), so strong was the effort of the Federal fascist government to dial down the contentious and rebellious Catalan culture, the locus of which was the Spanish Civil War. A significant number of the older generation of Catalans to this day find it difficult to write in their native language so strong was the repression. Anyway, the movie is legend here, especially since Frank Sinatra flew in to Barcelona and drove straight to Tossa to try to intercept his own Pandora in the person of Ava Gardner who was at the time being courted by a famous bullfighter of the period. Art and life in flux.

I post this in order to remind myself of a pipe dream of remaking Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in two ways: one, an art movie with friends and cheap production techniques, relying on knuckleheaded kismet all along the way; and another, a real Hollywood production with an honest to goodness femme fatal. As I had blogged in the past, Angelina Jolie has faded as a candidate and the question as to who could fill the shoes of Ava Gardner is an open one. Please by all means send me an email if you have any ideas. Alas, the second pipe dream is as substantial as the smoke wafting from my Marlborough... but then many good things in my life started out with a wish upon a star.

Here is the first of twelve YouTube episodes available online. An interesting link about the restoration of the film is here.