Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) commands the whaler Pequod in 1842 and convinces the crew that they should pursue and kill the giant white whale, Moby Dick, instead of doing their jobs. Ahab has vengeance on his mind, the whale having divested him of a leg on a previous voyage. But it goes beyond that. The whale stands for Something with a capital S, but it's not clear exactly what. "He haunts me," says Ahab to his first mate, Starbuck (Leo Genn). "He heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate." Whatever the thing behind the mask is, it's not a sled named Rosebud. The story is a impasto of meanings, some personal, some theological, and some positively mystical. Ahab's quest is at bottom blasphemous. A "dumb brute" has taken his leg, more or less in self defense, and Ahab refuses to accept his fate.
A couple of observations. At the turn of the last century, Max Weber, a German sociologist, wrote "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," in which he argued that it was Protestantism, with its idea of a "calling", that facilitated the development of industrialism. A truly religious man worked hard to make a lot of money or, as Starbuck puts it, the whalers of the time provided the world with oil, which was good for society and was therefor a service to God. Melville was also right in making Starbuck a Quaker because Quakers valued humility before arrogance. (Massachussetts has given us more presidents than any other state; Pennsylvania has given us one.) That's from E. Digby Baltzell, not Weber. I mention Weber's insight though because it's kind of important to our understanding of how shocking Ahab's decision was, to put aside what was a service to God in order to satisfy his individual desire. Nowadays we accept self satisfaction as worthwhile in itself. In 1842, it was like giving God the finger.
Undoubtedly, the whale oil lobby of the time would have endorsed this religious sentiment. The whale oil interests fought like the devil to keep the street lamps from being lighted by kerosene or gas.
There are obvious Biblical parallels too -- Ishmael and Elijah -- but it's not clear exactly what they mean. Elijah in the story is a raggedy man who predicts the crew's fate before they sail, so he is a prophet, as in the Bible.
The performances are pretty good. Gregory Peck is surprisingly effective as the half-mad captain, considering that lunacy is not his strong point. The rest of the crew are up to par. Orson Welles as Father Mapple gives a terrifically hammy sermon from his ivory pulpit. The use of music is pretty well done, though the score itself is unexceptional. At the first sighting of Moby Dick, there is no sound at all but the hushed rushing of sea water from the beast's field and the whoosh of water from his spout. In a modern film we'd expect the scene to be overscored. The editing is a little clumsy. A shot of Pip, the ship's boy (who plays a much larger part in the novel), seems to come from another movie. And the special effects are not what they would be today, but we have to give them a pass because everyone in 1956 was working within technological limits, as we are today. It would have been nice, though, to have a Moby Dick as realistic as the shark in "Jaws." Maybe Hollywood will still come around to the idea that it is time to remake the movie, so many remakes of so many earlier films having appeared in the last two decades that one wonders if the industry has run out of original ideas entirely. The next version may be a sequel: "Moby Dick, Part Two: Ishmael's Revenge."
Ray Bradbury's script makes a couple of changes from the novel, almost all of them necessary, since the novel is over 700 pages long and no movie can be infinitely long. I didn't understand some of the changes though. Starbuck, the Quaker first mate, tries unsuccessfully to steer the Pequod away from the murderous whale. In the movie, he shouts to the others that Moby Dick in only a whale, and "we kill whales", and they attack Moby Dick and die. There's also a suggestion in the movie that Moby Dick dies. That would be ridiculous.
On the whole I didn't find the real scenes of harpooning and killing whales (shot off the Irish coast) to be very satisfying. Whales are mammals, the biggest on earth, and harmless to us. I was walking along the shore of Chichigoff Island in Alaska, miles from any human, and was startled by a long, loud, echoing crack of expelled breath as two huge whales pushed placidly to the surface, maybe one hundred feet away. The experience had me shivering. Maybe that's part of what Melville was trying to get at. Isn't it a bit blasphemous to tear apart the planet we live on, instead of treating as a God-given trust? I don't know. I'm just wondering if Melville may have had, among his other concerns, some sense of living in harmony with Nature, with a capital N. It's hard to pin down exactly "what inscrutable thing" Melville and Ahab were dealing with, except that it was more than just a big cetacean.
A couple of observations. At the turn of the last century, Max Weber, a German sociologist, wrote "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," in which he argued that it was Protestantism, with its idea of a "calling", that facilitated the development of industrialism. A truly religious man worked hard to make a lot of money or, as Starbuck puts it, the whalers of the time provided the world with oil, which was good for society and was therefor a service to God. Melville was also right in making Starbuck a Quaker because Quakers valued humility before arrogance. (Massachussetts has given us more presidents than any other state; Pennsylvania has given us one.) That's from E. Digby Baltzell, not Weber. I mention Weber's insight though because it's kind of important to our understanding of how shocking Ahab's decision was, to put aside what was a service to God in order to satisfy his individual desire. Nowadays we accept self satisfaction as worthwhile in itself. In 1842, it was like giving God the finger.
Undoubtedly, the whale oil lobby of the time would have endorsed this religious sentiment. The whale oil interests fought like the devil to keep the street lamps from being lighted by kerosene or gas.
There are obvious Biblical parallels too -- Ishmael and Elijah -- but it's not clear exactly what they mean. Elijah in the story is a raggedy man who predicts the crew's fate before they sail, so he is a prophet, as in the Bible.
The performances are pretty good. Gregory Peck is surprisingly effective as the half-mad captain, considering that lunacy is not his strong point. The rest of the crew are up to par. Orson Welles as Father Mapple gives a terrifically hammy sermon from his ivory pulpit. The use of music is pretty well done, though the score itself is unexceptional. At the first sighting of Moby Dick, there is no sound at all but the hushed rushing of sea water from the beast's field and the whoosh of water from his spout. In a modern film we'd expect the scene to be overscored. The editing is a little clumsy. A shot of Pip, the ship's boy (who plays a much larger part in the novel), seems to come from another movie. And the special effects are not what they would be today, but we have to give them a pass because everyone in 1956 was working within technological limits, as we are today. It would have been nice, though, to have a Moby Dick as realistic as the shark in "Jaws." Maybe Hollywood will still come around to the idea that it is time to remake the movie, so many remakes of so many earlier films having appeared in the last two decades that one wonders if the industry has run out of original ideas entirely. The next version may be a sequel: "Moby Dick, Part Two: Ishmael's Revenge."
Ray Bradbury's script makes a couple of changes from the novel, almost all of them necessary, since the novel is over 700 pages long and no movie can be infinitely long. I didn't understand some of the changes though. Starbuck, the Quaker first mate, tries unsuccessfully to steer the Pequod away from the murderous whale. In the movie, he shouts to the others that Moby Dick in only a whale, and "we kill whales", and they attack Moby Dick and die. There's also a suggestion in the movie that Moby Dick dies. That would be ridiculous.
On the whole I didn't find the real scenes of harpooning and killing whales (shot off the Irish coast) to be very satisfying. Whales are mammals, the biggest on earth, and harmless to us. I was walking along the shore of Chichigoff Island in Alaska, miles from any human, and was startled by a long, loud, echoing crack of expelled breath as two huge whales pushed placidly to the surface, maybe one hundred feet away. The experience had me shivering. Maybe that's part of what Melville was trying to get at. Isn't it a bit blasphemous to tear apart the planet we live on, instead of treating as a God-given trust? I don't know. I'm just wondering if Melville may have had, among his other concerns, some sense of living in harmony with Nature, with a capital N. It's hard to pin down exactly "what inscrutable thing" Melville and Ahab were dealing with, except that it was more than just a big cetacean.