A month or so ago, in my blog of LUST FOR LIFE on Reel 13, I mentioned how I did a study on fifties films for an essay I was working on. I also mentioned that I listed LUST FOR LIFE as 10 on my top ten list for 1956. Well, this week's Reel 13 Classic – MOBY DICK – actually was my 9 film of that year.
In many ways, it's the perfect story for director John Huston. It's a very masculine story and also manages to deal with some of Huston's favorite themes – greed, revenge and obsession (as the story goes, Huston himself, became fascinated with hunting elephants in Africa during the shooting of THE AFRICAN QUEEN five years earlier). So, it's no wonder that MOBY DICK is as successful as it is on screen.
Really, in my mind, it's the details that make the movie work. Huston does a great job of using cutaways to show the smaller aspects of whaling and the whaling community. He shows you how it was done (its accuracy is debatable, but I certainly don't know any better, so I'll take the film at it's word) and what it was like, which gives the film a vitality and sense of realism that you wouldn't expect from such a period piece. Additionally, Huston smartly employs a quick pace and strong, stark angles of the camera to add to both the tension and the excitement.
Sadly, Gregory Peck is not very convincing as the infamous and complicated Captain Ahab. His body language is forced and not very believable, which can also be said of his verbal language. He, and many of the other actors, struggle with the old nature of the dialogue. They just can't manage to make it sound natural. Similarly, the mystical elements in the film are also a bit awkward (Several soothsayers and St. Elmo's fire are very weird moments), but seem to be in keeping with the period. Perhaps, here, it is Huston who struggles to translate a dated element of the narrative. Along the same lines, Richard Basehart's voiceover as Ishmael is cinematically tiresome, but I suppose it's there to celebrate the prose of Melville (honestly, I think all that we needed was "Call me Ishmael" to open the film and then he could have shut up for the rest of the movie).
None of these flaws, however, manage to sink the film altogether. At the heart of the film is a great adventure story by Melville that manages to also underscore many elements of human nature including our innate desire to achieve – to reach higher, go farther and accomplish more than the generation before. It also displays the arrogance of humans to consistently assume that we are always the most intelligent and dominant species on the planet. Huston uses his vast knowledge of film form to cover all this ground as well as to make this world as palpable as he can and the results are very worthwhile.
(For more information on this or any other Reel 13 film, check out www.reel13.org)