Moby Dick
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DVD Cover Information Actor: Gregory Peck, Harry Andrews, James Robertson Justice, Leo Genn, Richard Basehart Director: John Huston Brand: Sony Producer: John Huston Writer: John Huston Producer: Jack Clayton Producer: Lee Katz Writer: Herman Melville Writer: Norman Corwin Writer: Ray Bradbury DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono Format: Anamorphic, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled Picture Format: 1.78:1 Running Time: 116 minutes DVD Release Date: 2001-06-19 Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Studio: MGM (Video & DVD) |
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Movie Reviews of Moby Dick
Movie Review: Moby's Dick
Summary: 1 Stars
Moby-Dick is the overindulgent, homoerotic tale of the lust that surfaces between two English men, an enormous whale and an American harpooner aboard a whale ship called the HMS Serapis. It's stock full of rich slang, metaphor and jaunty old English that most readers won't understand, (especially in America since the education system is laggard and no one bothers to read books there anymore).
If you're from Europe, you'll love the portrait of American sailors as "smug, self centered prejudiced scoundrels".
Moby-Dick is classic of adventure.
John Huston's film of MOBY DICK is a lousy film. It's a lousy film in its own right, apart from the great novel upon which it is based.
Bradbury and Huston together murdered both Melville and Moby Dick. The factual errors in the film are too numerous to count, and are mostly gratuitious, based I'm sure on the assumption that most in the audience haven't read the novel. The dramatic tone is also, for the most part, false. There are great performances by Orson Welles and Gregory Peck, but Peck is given very poor material to work with, a very truncated Ahab.
The biggest disappointment was watching the Madeirans hunt poor Right whales and try to make believe that this was something like the "Nantucket sleigh ride" of the old sperm whale fishery.
The incredible truth of the sperm whale fishery described so vividly by Melville deserves better than the film efforts that have so far been made. Of course, the novel is much more than a whaling adventure. It is a meditation on good and evil, and a portrait of obsession, among other things. But Melville takes great pains to get the whaling right, as the ground for his great artistic vision, and a film that doesn't get the whaling right really can't do justice to the novel. Huston's version, of course, gets neither the whaling nor the novel and certainly not the artistic vision right. Huston was capable of great artistry, but did not achieve it in this case.
"Master and Commander" shows that at least a part of the early 19th century nautical experience can be "gotten right" using modern film techniques. Perhaps one day a director of sufficient artistic vision, a combination of Peter Weir and Akira Kurosawa, will come along, who will be able to do justice to Moby Dick. Until that happens, expand your consciousness by reading the book.