Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 23-May-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Moby Dick (1956)

The literary appeal of Moby-Dick is immersion into an exotic lifestyle with its own rules, language, seasons, dangers, and dreams. The lifestyle is that of whalemen, specifically those sailing from New England, and the immersion is so intrinsic to the story that the grounding dose of religion comes from a preacher in a pulpit rigged like a ship's prow. Director John Huston's adaptation of Herman Melville's classic captures its flavor without going overboard with its detail. (And the preacher scene affords a fine cameo by Orson Welles.) True, the sight of hunting and killing animals is not pleasant, but the action takes place in a bygone age when the pursuit represented a courageous fight between man and nature instead of arrogant sport.

Along with its high seas allure, Moby-Dick is best known for the character of Captain Ahab, who is, shall we say, a few yards short of a mainsail. His leg was bitten off by a whale called "Moby Dick" and he lives for revenge without thought of Christian humility or his crewmen's lives. Ahab does not appear until 30 minutes into the film, a great buildup which unfortunately leads to a letdown. Gregory Peck, a favorite of mine as any Jujube reader knows, simply does not get his arms around the role. One can see why the studio thought his stately presence would work in a nonheroic but larger-than-life part, and he does look impressive while battling his nemesis and inspiring his men to awe. But Peck seems to think that madness entails lockjaw, and a viewer is hard pressed to accept that such a rigid weirdo might have existed.

The men on Ahab's ship are more believable, notably the narrator Ishmael (Richard Basehart), the mutinous first officer Starbuck (Leo Genn), and even the romanticized savage Queequeg (Friedrich Ledebur). They undergo the highs and lows of nautical life as Ahab pursues his prey from Massachusetts to the Pacific. Like many a magnetic personality, Moby Dick has widespread fame and groupies. (A flock of birds, white like he is, follows wherever he goes.) He upstages Ahab in part because he does not have to deliver any lines, and because an intelligent, ornery, possibly diabolical leviathan is naturally thrilling. The showdown between him and the whalers packs a real punch (and may satisfy those disturbed by earlier scenes of whale-killing). In the end Moby Dick is an action flick as much as passage to a strange world and a (somewhat disappointing) study of character.

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