Story“Hollywood in Franco’s Spain” (1/6). In 1950, the American actress shot “Pandora” on the Costa Brava. This film inaugurates an intense collaboration between the Franco dictatorship, which wants to improve its image, and the Californian studios, which find in Spain magical landscapes and attractive production costs.
Hurricane Ava Gardner arrived in Tossa de Mar in April 1950. Neither the goddess of the screen nor the tiny village of the Costa Brava, in Catalonia, would emerge unscathed from this encounter. The American actress arrives in Spain to shoot Pandora, a film directed by American director Albert Lewin. She is 27 years old and is not yet a big star. We then talk more about her two marriages and her two divorces, the fact that billionaire Howard Hughes courted her, or even harassed her, than about her acting skills. Her sister Bappie, who has chaperoned her since the start of her career, accompanies her.
In his autobiography, Ava. Briefs (Presses de la Renaissance, 1991), released a few months after her death, the actress confides that of all her films, Pandora is probably one of the lesser known, outside the circle of moviegoers. But she adds: “Yet nothing that I did, neither before nor after, mattered so much. ” This feature film, the first in color for her, will propel her career to the top. And then, it is the opportunity for her to leave the United States for the first time. It allows him to discover England, and especially Spain, where most of the filming takes place.
It was then a country where the dictator Francisco Franco (1892-1975) reigned supreme, still marked by civil war and shortages, isolated in this post-war Europe and which did not keep pace with modernity. galloping from its main neighbors. This still peasant Spain, where cultural traditions are strong, is a shock to her. To the point, thereafter, of spending a large part of his life in Madrid. “It just took me a little trip never to look back “, writes the actress in her memoirs.
Lovers of the Costa Brava
Tossa de Mar is chosen by chance for the shoot. Albert Puig Palau, a Catalan textile industrialist, who likes to hang out with artists and play patron, invited Albert Lewin to his superb residence in Palamos, not far from Tossa, where he used to organize lavish parties. The filmmaker accepts, because he is looking for virgin landscapes for his next film. He visits the Costa Brava and immediately falls in love with it. This is where he will recreate the village he names Esperanza in Pandora.
The film begins with a fishing scene. During the first minutes, three men with features chiseled by the sea pull up their nets while speaking a strong Catalan, an exceptional thing in a Spain where the dictatorship fiercely imposes Castilian. They have a hard time pulling up their hold. “Do you think we’re holding a whale?” “, launches one of the fishermen, laughing. Suddenly they freeze. Two corpses are entangled in their mesh, those of the superb Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner) and of Hendrick van der Zee (James Mason), a mysterious Dutch navigator, living alone on his boat, where he paints enigmatic portraits.
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