Pandora and the Magic Box

Pandora and the Magic Box (1965)

* (out of 4)

This early Joe Sarno picture gathers Aphrodite, King Minos, Theseus and various others and we get sketches dealing with a missing daughter and other goofieness.

As I go through the career of director Sarno you will stumble across some real gems that seems to be close to the director's heart. You'll also stumble into pictures that seemed to be made as a job. Then you've got something like this, which is something that makes me scratch my head. If you walked into this movie after the opening credits then I doubt you'd be able to guess that it was a Sarno picture.

Reading around it seems that some enjoy this film for what it is but I'm certainly not in that league. I personally thought the film was rather lousy and the attempts at comedy didn't work. If you're expecting any sort of sexuality or nudity then forget about that. The film seems to have been shot on a high school stage with various props and costumes being used. It has an ultra cheap feel and look to it and it just never really connected with me.

A combination of scantily-clad, if not entirely nude, nudie-cutie girls and bad vaudeville humor, this black and white must have appeared as old-fashioned even when it was released. Hard to believe Sarno had anything to do with it. My main objective, however, in writing this review is to point out that the Pandora at the beginning of the film is not the same as that in Theseus' palace, who opens the box. The first may be a Ria Milan as given in the credits, but the latter seems to be Cara or Carol Peters. Although the Something Weird copy is poor, it looks like Cara is the dancer in the center of the group of dancers at the opening of the film, which we learn later are a group of Amazonian spear-carriers, when the section of film from which that scene is taken is viewed in context, and goes after the escaped "old woman."

At his best, Joe Sarno cranked out many effective '60s (and some '70s) melodramas. His fault was repeating himself, as many of the films, even the good ones, merge into an unmemorable sameness.

But PANDORA AND THE MAGIC BOX is an odd-film-out, a flight of fancy that fails to take wing but is an admirable attempt nonetheless. As with many other talented but limited auteurs (limited by economic factors), I lament the fact that Sarno was never able to make a real film freed from the requirement of delivering porn content.

Filled with pretty girls, tons of dancing, and a surplus of cute Borscht Belt humor, PANDORA is definitely an acquired taste. In his oeuvre it sticks out like the XXX genie film which I could not get into at all thanks to its Jewish stereotyping, A TOUCH OF GENIE.

With a cast of Greek gods and mortals name-dropped throughout, Queen Scylla is a sexy blonde dancer who does a hot striptease. I liked her better than Nick Millard's take on Scylla that he misspelled as Scyla (ask Nick, don't look at me for reasons) a couple of years later.

The target audience here was fans of the then-popular nudie-cuties, but Sarno for some reason doesn't bare breasts but rather teases with them showing through diaphanous outfits -a peek-a-boo approach. I suspect this didn't go over very well at the box office, as 85 minutes drag by without a single topless scene.

Ria Milan as Pandora is a cute brunette with big, pointy, gravity-defying breasts. Why she didn't make it in this field is a mystery. Poverty budget is a major drawback, noticeable in the chintzy sets and SPFX.