A Film Canon

This unusual film compensates for the fact that "we live in a time that has no faith in legend...a time that has no faith" with the manifesto for a new, mythical cinema. On the one hand, this takes the (quantitative) form of a collapse of different mythological registers - Greek and Germanic (narratively); Greek, Roman, Moorish and Celtic (spatially); and everything scriptally, such that utterance becomes synonymous with quotation, and every act seems to simply rehearse some more or less distant archetype. On the other, it takes the (qualitative) form of an intense sombience, whose most explicit technical index is Lewin and cinematographer Jack Cardiff's combination of Technicolour with both on-location and night shooting, extending its lurid irrealism to the real world, but simultaneously tempering it with nocturnal, Mediterranean hues. More subtly, Lewin manages to imbue everything with the slightly off-kilter, dreamy heave of the Dutchman's (James Mason) yacht - from Pandora's other-worldiness, perfectly suited to Ava Gardner's (admittedly fairly one- dimensional, but in this case appropriate) languidness, to the two central spectacles of the film - a bull-fight and car race - whose visceral, even sexual, intensity is, astonishingly, subsumed back into the ether. In turn, the latter's threatening undertones are encapsulated in the predominance of Arnold's 'Dover Beach', which becomes a cipher for the mythological paucity described, and clarifies the fictional Spanish town of Esperanzo around which the narrative revolves as the site of contention, rather than victory, of this new aesthetic vision, which, admittedly, has some serious flaws - most notably a tendency to excessive discursion whenever the two leads' hallucinatory presence is withdrawn, epitomised by the framing device, in which a local archaeologist extemporises to himself.