Albert Lewin, who collected Surrealist art and was a friend of Man Ray, unlike the other American directors in our series set out to make a popular film with Surrealist overtones. The Flying Dutchman, according to legend, was condemned to sail the seas forever until he could find a woman who would love him enough to give up her life for him. When we meet our modern-day Dutchman (James Mason), he is painting a portrait of a woman he has never seen. Only later does his "model" make her presence known, in the person of Ava Gardner, when she swims naked up to his yacht. A car racing along a beach strewn with ancient Greek statues, a moonlit dance among the ruins (while the band plays "You're Driving Me Crazy"), are evidence of the acknowledged influence on Lewin of the Surrealists-particularly de Chirico and Delvaux. Alongside the provocative use of painterly images juxtaposing the classic and the contemporary, the love story, too, reconciles past and present in predestination.