Moby Dick

 Moby Dick

Genre: Adventure/Epic

Director: John Huston

Released: 1956


     The first thing I did once I realized that I was loving reading Moby Dick -or- The Whale was research whether or not it had any worthwhile movie adaptations. A straightforward answer proved surprisingly elusive, as this American classic has been adapted and reimagined dozens of times in mini-series, movies, and comic books to varying degrees of success. Eventually I came to a generally liked 1956 adaptation directed by John Huston and starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. Not an hour after clearing the final page of Melville's doorstop novel I fired up Amazon Prime and gave it a watch and was treated to a serviceable, if superficial, cinematic interpretation of some very challenging source material.

     In case you missed it in high school, Moby Dick is the story of a whaling ship called the Pequod, captained by Ahab, whose leg was torn off by the titular Moby Dick: a legendary sperm whale with a hide the color of snow and a mind of frighteningly intelligent malevolence. After recovering and appending a carved whale bone to his stump to serve as a new leg, the tormented Captain Ahab swears vengeance against the white whale and convinces his crew, including the story's narrator Ishmael, to hunt the whale and kill it. 

     Clocking in at an eye-watering six hundred and forty six pages, a movie adaptation of Moby Dick was always going to be a tricky prospect. Although undeniably brilliant, many of Moby Dick's chapters, which have a habit of taking EXTENSIVE detours into the finer points of whaling and whale biology, simply defy filming unless you're really, really into marine life. Moby Dick the movie had a lot of trimming to do, then, and it manages to strike a decent balance. No one stares into the camera and spends fifteen minutes explaining the history of the color white, and the film shuffles around some conversations and encounters to make them more streamlined. That being said, there are some strange decisions being made about what to include and what to excise. Subplots like Ishmael's friend's brush with death don't really make sense in light of the removal of certain other characters and interconnected subplots I won't spoil book-wise. They weigh down the movie and are especially strange given that there is plenty of interesting and funny material that the movie discharged to make room for decidedly less engaging text. 

     The core of what made the book brilliant remains, however, and I'm of course referring to Captain Ahab's obsessive, globe-spanning search for the White Whale. Ahab is one of the great characters of American literature, and his terrible, frenzied need to destroy Moby Dick is well realized here. Gregory Peck turns in a decent performance as the vengeful captain, but the writing, much of it taken verbatim from Melville's novel, does a lot of the heavy lifting. As with the rest of the book there's plenty left out, but even in reduced form Ahab remains a potent portrait of how people are corrupted by their demons and the all-consuming drive to assert dominance over that which terrifies and has wounded us the most. 

     Technically the movie does a lot with quite a little. I've always found an old-school charm in miniatures and prosthetic models, and I was particularly impressed with the scale that the movie manages to communicate through the use of extreme close ups of little whale models (or giant whale backs probably made out of rubber). I would have liked something more grand and epic in keeping with the sweeping scope of the source material, but I understand that it would have been difficult with the technology of the time to achieve that (modern adaptation, anyone?). 

     All in all, I'd call this a strong attempt. Like a mountaineer who takes on Everest and doesn't quite clear the peak, I have a lot of respect for the effort, and I'm glad they made it as far as they did. They just could have made it a little further.


B-