WHALE OF A TALE
Huston’s ‘Moby Dick’ divided audiences in 1956, and the film’s unspeakable strangeness still shines through
Ihad just entered third grade when I first saw John Huston’s 1956 Moby Dick (newly reissued on DVD by Kino Lorber). Why, I now wonder, did my father take me to that particular movie? Was it because my favourite book was Treasure Island?
Because I admired the blue whale suspended from the ceiling at the Museum of Natural History? Was it that the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther praised Moby Dick as “a rolling and thundering colour film that is herewith devoutly recommended as one of the great motion pictures of our times”?
The circumstances are obscure, but the experience remains vivid. Moby Dick impressed me as no other movie would until I saw Dr Strangelove some eight years later. Few now regard Huston’s film as a classic, and perhaps not so many did then.
Huston was voted the year’s best director by the New York Film Critics Circle, but Moby Dick failed to get a single Oscar nomination — not even for cinematography, in recognition of what Crowther called the movie’s “strange, subdued colour scheme”. (To evoke the quality of 19th-century engravings, Huston tempered his Technicolor images with a monochromatic overlay.) The letters to The Times, printed under the headline “Fans Harpoon Moby Dick,” were brutal. “It is hard for me to believe that my favourite screen critic was really taken in by the contortions, contraptions and contrivances of Moby Dick,” one began. Another scorned “the weak, bloomer-girl way in which Captain Ahab’s crew threw their harpoons”.
Well, I can’t be objective. To revisit Moby Dick, even on a muddy DVD, is to re-experience and perhaps even harpoon my seven-year-old self.
The movie’s very first moment, with Richard Basehart announcing “Call me Ishmael” while trudging through a blustery New England (actually Irish) landscape, brought back the distinctly foreboding atmosphere. Ray Bradbury’s streamlined screenplay (written with Huston) flows from omen to portent to what struck me then (and even now) as a cosmic denouement — the sky filled with gulls; the flimsy-looking boats waiting for the creature to breach the surface; the cabin boy Pip left to mind the Pequod alone; the hand-to-hand, boat-capsizing combat; and the mad vortex that sucks the ship under the sea.
“Everything in Moby-Dick is saturated in a mental atmosphere,” the critic Alfred Kazin wrote of the novel. Huston’s movie cannot begin to approximate Melville’s subtle moral philosophy or evoke the complexity of his metaphors, but, sitting in the Mayfair Theatre on Fresh Meadow Lane in Queens, I brought my own childish metaphysics to the screen.
I was impressed by the garishly tattooed Queequeg (played by Friedrich Ledebur, an aristocratic pal of Huston’s) and the first mate Starbuck (the British actor Leo Genn), the tragically ineffectual “good guy”, but mainly I was fascinated by the movie’s unspeakably strange Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck).
Critics were not kind to Peck. Even Bradbury thought he was miscast, “a dear sweet gentleman” incapable of conveying the role’s necessary lunacy. (In The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris archly suggested that Huston should have played the role himself and let Orson Welles, who has a cameo as Father Mapple, direct.)
As a seven-year-old, I was used to scenery-chewing villains and found Peck’s understated Ahab an enigmatic figure — looking like an evil Abraham Lincoln with a prosthetic scar and piratical peg leg, lolling his head and rolling his eyes, as he hypnotised the Pequod’s crew. (Dad, should I be rooting for him or the oversized underdog that is the white whale?)
“I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as a lamb,” Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne after finishing Moby-Dick. Huston, at the time widely regarded as Hollywood’s greatest director, laboured three years on the motion picture equivalent of a Classics Illustrated comic book and paid the price for popularising a literary masterpiece.
Yet, when I did read the novel, my familiarity with its plot and appreciation for its weirdness kept me chugging along through the book’s didactic, digressive passages.
Revisiting Melville after rewatching Huston’s visualisation, I was surprised to discover that one of my favourite riffs — the prophetic vision that foretells Ahab’s beckoning corpse, plastered to the whale — was invented by Bradbury. While more a vulgarisation of than an improvement on Melville, this bit of business chills the mental atmosphere with an added frisson. The wrinkled rubber contraption that amazed me as a child impresses me still.