John Huston (1956)

A pity to repeat the standard criticism but the notorious miscasting of Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab is what finally does for John Huston’s adaptation of Moby Dick.  Peck’s height makes his Ahab quite an impressive figure – from a distance, at any rate:  on closer inspection, he has the look of an Abraham Lincoln impersonator.  But it’s when he starts to speak – or, rather, declaim – that you realise how wrong Peck is for the role.  The sanest of actors, he’s ill-equipped to play a man in the grip of an obsession that renders him demented and just about demonic.  Ahab lost part of a leg in his previous encounter with Moby-Dick and has a false limb made of whalebone but Peck is thoroughly wooden – the result of his straining to animate the captain’s crazed quest to kill the creature.  He has one good moment, when Ahab says, quietly yet urgently and virtually to himself, that the great white whale is ‘very close now’.  Otherwise, he’s uncomfortable to watch and listen to, and the measure of his miscasting is thrown into relief by Leo Genn as Starbuck.  Although Ahab’s first mate is meant to be a Christian of a rational cast of mind, Genn has much more sinister presence (and vocal dexterity) than Gregory Peck.

According to Wikipedia:

‘Peck was initially surprised to be cast as Ahab (part of the studio [Warner Bros]’s agreement to fund the film was that Huston use a “name” actor as Ahab).  Peck later commented that he felt Huston himself should have played Ahab.  Huston had long wanted to make a film of Moby-Dick, and had intended to cast his own father, actor Walter Huston as Ahab, but he had died in 1950.’

The director, however, had more than enough on his hands already.  In retrospect, Huston described Moby Dick as the most demanding assignment of his long career – thanks to the challenge of compressing Herman Melville’s enormous novel (a task assigned to Ray Bradbury, although Huston eventually shared the screenplay credit), a protracted shooting schedule that sent the production well over budget, and the technical demands of the action sequences at sea, especially the realisation of Ahab’s nemesis.  I’d never seen the film before.  Coming to it for the first time in the age of CGI, you can’t help but admire the huge nerve, resource and effort that went into making it.   On the other hand, if such admiration is uppermost in your mind as you watch (it was in mine), you’re also aware that Huston is failing to engage you fully.

There are good bits, for sure:  an introduction that takes Ishmael from solitary seashore reminiscence back in time to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he signs up for the whaling voyage; Father Mapple’s church sermon on Jonah (excitingly delivered by Orson Welles).  Huston constructs a fine sequence in which the whaler’s lookout man plummets to the sea; the man-overboard hubbub that follows his fall yields nothing more than the quiet movement of the ship’s rigging that confirms the lost man’s permanent absence.   As a whole, though, the film is stranded between originality and conventionality.  One example of the latter is a score by Philip Stainton that presents the story as standard-issue high-seas-adventure drama.   It says something about Huston’s Moby Dick that it’s at its most atmospheric when the ship is becalmed.

The Pequod, with its mongrel crew, is a good place for actors unsure of their accents to find safety in numbers.  They include Harry Andrews and Bernard Miles but all concerned are physically well cast and presences strong enough to distract you from vocal details.  Friedrich von Ledebur cuts a splendid figure as the tattooed Polynesian harpooner Queequeg.  Richard Basehart is the narrator Ishmael and thereby entrusted with one of the most famous opening lines in world literature.  Basehart seems to feel the weight of that responsibility in his careful delivery of ‘Call me Ishmael’ but does better with the Pequod’s sole survivor’s closing ‘I alone am escaped to tell you’.  In between, he’s adequate and unremarkable.   After Gregory Peck, though, the biggest disappointment in the cast is the title character – here’s where it’s difficult to overlook the benefits of technical progress.  Too often, Moby Dick looks what he is, an artificial construction.  He’s at his most expressive not as a terrifying monster of the deep but as a beleaguered, many-speared bulk.

4 February 2019