The story is pure schlock, but there's enough striking imagery (including the stars) to make this worth watching. This is basically an arty Woman's Picture shot in the style of the Spanish surrealist, with burning blue skies, dark browns and bright yellows, and lonely statues standing sentry at the seashore. You know what you're in for when the Rubaiyat turns up in a drowned man's hand. It's a little clunky and it's not exactly surrealism (expensive to film because you have to build the deformed stuff) but it's an honest attempt to do something like it without the cheap trick of montage, and Lewin gets off some striking compositions. Man Ray did the paintings.
The title tells the story: a cursed sailor from the past (Mason), doomed to sail the oceans forever, finds himself drawn to modern Spain, where a singing American playgirl (Gardner) is tormenting male expats, including an English race car driver and a local matador while an archaeologist investigates. No playgirl ever came from Indianapolis, but never mind. It's surrealism, like putting the Dali museum in Florida. This Indiana Pandora is unable to love...until she discovers that the sailor, who is also a sort of Sunday painter (he gets bored out there by himself) has worked up a portrait of her sight unseen.
I liked this movie in spite of myself, but the truth is its success depends entirely on the casting, not the writing. Like LAURA, it depends on having a beautiful female lead. It needs one even more than usual because Gardner's idea of how to play an enigma is about as credible as the idea of a playgirl from Indianapolis. (In France, where they like beautiful things that don't make any sense, Gardner's performance was celebrated.) Like LAURA it also needs a moody, haunted, self-loathing yet attractive male lead who can play solo scenes and put over brooding emotions in close-up. Gardner and Mason certainly fit this bill and they help make this movie a success on balance. Indeed, no one but Mason could possibly have played this role. You certainly don't confuse this movie with anything else, except maybe VERTIGO (which rips some of it off).
The title tells the story: a cursed sailor from the past (Mason), doomed to sail the oceans forever, finds himself drawn to modern Spain, where a singing American playgirl (Gardner) is tormenting male expats, including an English race car driver and a local matador while an archaeologist investigates. No playgirl ever came from Indianapolis, but never mind. It's surrealism, like putting the Dali museum in Florida. This Indiana Pandora is unable to love...until she discovers that the sailor, who is also a sort of Sunday painter (he gets bored out there by himself) has worked up a portrait of her sight unseen.
I liked this movie in spite of myself, but the truth is its success depends entirely on the casting, not the writing. Like LAURA, it depends on having a beautiful female lead. It needs one even more than usual because Gardner's idea of how to play an enigma is about as credible as the idea of a playgirl from Indianapolis. (In France, where they like beautiful things that don't make any sense, Gardner's performance was celebrated.) Like LAURA it also needs a moody, haunted, self-loathing yet attractive male lead who can play solo scenes and put over brooding emotions in close-up. Gardner and Mason certainly fit this bill and they help make this movie a success on balance. Indeed, no one but Mason could possibly have played this role. You certainly don't confuse this movie with anything else, except maybe VERTIGO (which rips some of it off).