Moby Dick (1956)

Even after getting burned by Lynch's Dune, I make a point to watch adaptations from famous novels I'm unlikely to read. Oh, I do read long and heady books for leisure, but enough people have deemed Herman Melville's classic dull that I'd rather take a chance on a two-hour vicarious boat ride, particularly one with respectable IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores as well as reputedly decent fidelity. (I didn't trust the facetious stage musical.) Being in a poor position to evaluate the fidelity, I must settle for the cinematic quality.

You should all know the story's gist: Nineteenth-century whaling ship captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) unwisely seeks vengeance on the oddly named white whale. Little did I imagine how late in the story narrator Ishmael (Richard Basehart) sees Ahab's face or hears his voice. I think the island savage Queequeg gets more screen time. Guess Ahab, for all his obsession, has the most stand-out personality on the Pequod. I hardly know how to describe first mate Starbuck (Leo Genn), and he's one of the more famous characters. We learn a lot more names, but in this capsulized edition, they hardly seem worth remembering; only the cabin boy gets my sympathy.

The casting of Peck may be the most controversial aspect. The studio had to choose someone highly bankable for the time in order to justify shooting an expensive seafaring tale with no female characters outside of a one-scene church congregation, but Peck was 20 years too young. Ahab is supposed to be more than twice Ishmael's age, yet Basehart was slightly older! I would have preferred several other options the studio considered, including Orson Welles, who cameos as Jonah-citing Father Mapple. As it turns out, the project never did make a profit.

It's a 1950s take on an 1850s novel, so we can't expect political correctness. Nevertheless, Queequeg is pretty enjoyable, maybe even likable apart from his cannibal past, and the three other racial/ethnic minorities aboard seem OK. I accept it as fair for its day.

The story includes a few improbable events that border on fantasy, starting with a prophecy by a man called Elijah. This rubs me the wrong way; I think serious writers should either attempt full realism or make it clear throughout that they have no such aim. Maybe in that sense, I'm applying a modern sensibility to a dated style.

At any rate, the movie did succeed in not boring me. The handful of action sequences look pretty good, including the fake leviathan himself, and we're spared the nautical jargon. On the other hand, despite heavy reliance on dialog and narration, we receive little in the way of colorful language. By the end, I still had almost no idea what made the book so popular.

In all likelihood, there is no good way to transition the literary value from the page to the screen to the same extent as Melville's Billy Budd. The best we can hope for is a moderately educational piece of entertainment. The 1956 Moby Dick suffices, but I leave it to you to decide where your priorities lie.