NR | 1h 56m | Drama | 1956
Inspired by Herman Melville’s novel, producer-director John Huston is exact with his film’s nautical look and feel, 19th-century set design, costumes, and dialogue. He even mimics Melville’s Miltonic tone.
It’s 1841. At the rain-drenched port town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Ishmael (Richard Basehart), also the narrator, joins Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck), chief mate Starbuck (Leo Genn), and their crew aboard the whaling ship, Pequod, which is headed for the Pacific. Just before setting out, Ishmael hears local priest Fr. Mapple (Orson Welles) warn his laity against living a false and selfish life. Ishmael also comes across dock vagabond, Elijah, who prophesies that all, save one, who follow Ahab into sea will perish.
Unlike other whaling captains, Ahab isn’t hunting just any whale; he’s after “the” whale, Moby Dick, as white and as “big as a mountain of snow.” Ahab had lost his leg hunting it. Since then, limping on a white wood stump, he scours the seas, set on hunting it down again, this time to the death.
More Than a Whale?
Starbuck and the crew are devoted to their captain. That devotion is about to be tested. First, Ahab tolerates their itch to stop for every whale they spy. But when Gardiner, captaining another ship, reports sighting Moby Dick, Ahab’s eyes narrow. Now, he’ll stop for nothing, not even to help search for Gardiner’s son who went missing after Gardiner’s encounter with Moby Dick.As storms lash the Pequod, Starbuck confronts Ahab. Will he risk the lives of his crew just to settle scores with a whale? Soon, all on board, Ahab included, wonder: Is Moby Dick more than a whale? A few of them wonder: Is Ahab more than a man?
With no land in sight for much of the film, even Huston’s scenes on land breathe biblical symbolism; Mapple’s pulpit, shaped like a whaling ship’s figurehead with a harpoon at the ready, resembles a prone cross.
Peck plays against type and, rather endearingly, struggles at it. Welles appears for all of five minutes, yet his commanding presence, voice, and message as Mapple, haunts the two-hour film.
Genn excels as Ahab’s conscience, as he watches the captain leading his men to their deaths in water. In “Quo Vadis” (1951), Genn plays a similarly restraining role as counsel to Emperor Caesar, who is bent on leading his men to their deaths in fire. In both roles, Genn defends against false human notions of their omnipotence and divinity, and for a divine, truthful view of human nature.
Inner Godliness
Overly linear or literal readings might dismiss this screenplay as a fatalistic fable about self-destructive whalers. But the self that concerned both Huston and Melville, is the inner self, whether it’s on a ship chasing elusive illusions or in deep waters being chased by them.To Melville, it’s the illusion of man’s separateness from God, man divided against himself, that must be hunted and harpooned so that, as Ishmael says, its blubber can be boiled down to a pure oil that’ll keep, “lamps burning in a thousand homes … clocks ticking on their mantelpieces, and perhaps anoint the head of a king.”
Sometimes, it’s as if the whale is the pure one, all white, unlike Ahab’s one-legged pretended, painted whiteness. It’s as if it’s the whale that must be protected from Ahab’s harpoons of hypocrisy. One whaler says, if God wanted to be a fish, he’d be a whale. Another whaler confirms that birds, white “as angels” hover above Moby Dick, who’s been spied in “all oceans,” often 1,000 miles apart, at the same time.
One moment Ahab is akin to the first; he is the rebelling Adam. At other times, he’s closer to the second Adam, bearing, as Ishmael notes, “marks of some inner crucifixion,” whose self-sacrifice redeems the first.
It’s as if, in killing the whale, Ahab hopes to drown his willful self and resurrect his sacrificing self. Ishmael uses a marine metaphor: “There’s a magic in water that draws … men away from the land … to the sea … where each man, as in a mirror, finds himself.”
Ahab confides to Starbuck that he probably isn’t hunting the whale as much as the “inscrutable” thing that makes him deny his divine nature and defy human “lovings and longings.”
Fr. Mapple is clear. The biblical Jonah sinned when he disobeyed God. Yet, after his chastening encounter with a whale, sent by God, Jonah obeyed, preaching truth in the face of falsehood. Mapple insists, “the things that God would have us do are hard. If we would obey God, we must disobey ourselves.”
