Attempting to faithfully adapt the greatest American novel
is a mission as foolhardy as chasing a white whale. Yet, underneath Moby Dick’s blubbery layers of
nightmarish metaphors, whaling history, scrimshaw lessons, and weird cetology
is a good, old-fashioned adventure story fit for Hollywood. In 1956, director John
Huston and co-screenwriter Ray Bradbury brought that story to life with iconic
performances from Gregory Peck as self-destructively obsessed Captain Ahab, Leo
Genn as his moral adversary Starbuck, kind-faced Richard Basehart as our
narrator/surrogate Ishmael, Friedrich von Ledebur as Ishmael’s best pal
Queequeg, Orson Wells in a memorable cameo as a preacher, and Tony the Whale aaaaaaas
Moby Dick!
John Huston still manages to make Moby Dick more than the average widescreen actioner with strange
sepia coloring that removes the picture from its pastel decade, somber gravitas
and buckets of death imagery, and even a touch of mysticism (the appearance of
St. Elmo’s fire that injects a brief shock of fluorescent green into the film’s
clay-grey palette). On the flip side there’s a somewhat lazy tendency in Huston
and Bradbury’s script to spoon-feed themes and even information to the viewer. When
Stubb captions the first appearance of peg-legged Peck by muttering “Ahab,” anyone
who finished seventh grade lit will yell “Duh!” at the screen. But don’t let
that put you off, because Moby Dick
remains an exciting and artful interpretation of the most exciting passages in
Herman Melville’s epic.
Twilight Time’s much anticipated blu-ray presentation of Moby Dick had its work cut out for it
since the film’s distinctive look is so tied up with the so-called “gray
negative,” which preserved that near-monochrome aesthetic most authentically.
For this release, that drained coloring had to be painstakingly recreated, a
process explained in a six-minute featurette included with this release. Otherwise,
the image is blemish-free, naturally grained, and well detailed for a film
designed to look like a drizzly afternoon. Other extras include an audio
commentary with Twilight Time’s resident historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman
and film editor Paul Seydor, and they have a rollicking discussion about the
film’s themes and making and their own memories of seeing it, and a few promo
materials galleries. The blu-ray is available here.
