MOBY DICK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 927, 17 May 1957, Page 30

MOBY DICK

(Moulin-Warner Bros.) G Cert. Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that whiteheaded whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke-look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys! HIS production-in time, energy and artifice expended, John Huston’s most ‘ambitious film undertaking-is not the first stab at Moby Dick. Nigh on thirty years agone (if I sound like Melville at his worst, it’s from re-reading him in the dog-watches) Warner Bros, hurled a lance at leviathan, with old Jack Barrymore, who had played in a silent version called The Sea Beast, as the twice-tem-pered iron. They say, too, that he played Ahab well, but I did not see him and

an ocean of celluloid has rolled over his Ahab since that time. To be sure, comparisons, like dead whales, are odorous; but I couldn’t help thinking that with someone like Barrymore in the central role, Huston’s Moby Dick would have been great as well as good. Even with Gregory Peck (Huston’s major concession to the box-office) at the epicentre, the action at times rages with all the fury of a hurricane. But it is a hurricane with a stillness in the midst. Peck, though he plays valiantly and well in those scenes which demand most in physical exertion-the pursuit in the boats and Ahab’s last despairing on-

Slaught on the whale as he hangs bound to the monster by the convolutions of his own lines---conveys only in faint simulacrum Ahab’s_inward torment and unextinguishable fanaticism. Ahab, in fact, demands more ego than Peck possesses. The film would almost certainly have been better had he and Orson Welles (squandered on Father Mapple) switched parts, for Welles has ego-plus -ego plus the presence, the vocal resonance, and a flickering St. Elmo's fire of genius. Of the players as they ate, Leo Genn as Starbuck (for whom courage was a staple not to be foolishly wasted) seemed beyond doubt the bestread of them all. though

at one point his conflict with Ahab was uncomfortably reminiscent of The Caine Mutiny. Flask (Seamus Kelly) was wellsketched, and Queequeg (Friedrich Ledebur) a fing figure of a savage, but the real architects of success were Huston, his director of photography Oswald Morris, and the British technicians who contrived the special effects, The celebrated plastic whale (despite a hazardous