In partnership with The Film Foundation, iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese's exclusive monthly contribution to the TCM newsletter Now Playing in June 2015.
Albert Lewin was one of the most unusual directors of the Hollywood studio era, but he probably would have seemed unusual in any era. He mastered in English at Harvard and taught at the University of Missouri before he fought in WWI. When he returned home, he did a stint as a film critic then became a reader for Samuel Goldwyn and worked his way up to script clerk (for King Vidor and Victor Sjöstrom), and by the mid-'20s he was writing movies. Irving Thalberg made him his personal assistant at the end of the decade, and he was promoted to producer in the '30s. When Thalberg died, Lewin resigned from MGM and went to work at Paramount, where he was involved with some very unusual projects including Zaza, a French period drama with Claudette Colbert directed by George Cukor (unfortunately, that film is severely compromised by studio editing), and Spawn of the North, a rousing comedy adventure set in Alaska, directed by Henry Hathaway and written by Jules Furthman.
With his friend David Loew, Lewin independently produced So Ends Our Night, a lovely adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel about European refugees called Flotsam, and you can really feel his hand in that film (which was directed by John Cromwell). Lewin made his directorial debut in 1942 and directed only six films in all, five of them based on novels (his last, The Living Idol, is adapted from his own novel). The one exception, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, feels like an adaptation. It's actually inspired by two older sources: the tale of the Flying Dutchman, first told by 17th-century sailors; and the ancient Greek mythological figure of Pandora, "the first woman" forged by Hephaestus and Athena. Lewin was one of the few unapologetic intellectuals in Hollywood--a self-proclaimed "highbrow" (he was known around the MGM lot as "the Metrognome") with an impressive collection of modern art--and his pictures are all set in the world of high culture. He was working during an era when there was a shared idea of bringing culture to the masses, and he attempted to translate painterly and literary values into cinematic ones. The results are fascinating and Lewin's movies look and feel like no one else's: they're melancholy, hypnotic and filled with disenchanted characters. It's not at all surprising that he had such a close working relationship with George Sanders, an actor who more or less embodied disenchantment. Sanders starred in Lewin's first independently produced film, an adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, and he plays a key role in his powerful version of Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
TCM is showing both pictures in a little tribute to Lewin on June 27, alongside Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Each one is very special: the production design for all three is unique, very different from other studio films of the period; the dialogue is extremely literate; and in Dorian Gray and Pandora the mood is disturbing, unsettling, the characters driven by powerful forces beyond their control (it's almost as if Lewin himself believed in the Greek gods, toying with the souls of their human playthings). Dorian Gray is my favorite Lewin movie, but Pandora will always be very special to me. It's a powerfully mysterious and mesmerizing experience, and one of the most beautiful Technicolor pictures ever made (it was shot by the great Jack Cardiff). But all three of these movies are extraordinary. If you don't know Albert Lewin's work, you need to stay tuned to TCM on the night of June 27.
