Moby Dick

Starring: Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart Director: John Huston Dvd Release: 10th May, 2004 Number Of Discs: 1 Format: PAL, Region 0 Encoding

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A young man, Ishmael, decides to sign up as a sailor on the whaling ship 'Pequod'. He narrates the tale of that ill-fated voyage. Captain Ahab is hell bent on destroying a white whale, known as Moby Dick, that had maimed him on a previous whale hunt. Ship's officer Starbuck is disturbed when the normal hunt is abandoned in the midst of an extremely successful killing frenzy & whales already slaughtered are discarded so that Ahab can take off in pursuit of the recently sighted Moby Dick. Mr Starbuck is a religious man & regards Ahab's rage at a dumb animal that acted out of blind instinct, as blasphemous. But Ahab sees things differently. The animal has offended him & left him scared, with half a heart & half a lung. He says he would strike the sun if it insulted him & explains that the whale is just a mask & some inscrutable yet reasoning thing is behind it, & that's the thing he hates, because it's malignant. He believes that it's the thing that has terrified men since the beginning of time. He seems to believe that Moby Dick is a demon or a god. Starbuck is appalled & tries to persuade some of the more senior men to wrest control of the ship from Ahab, but they'll have none of it. Second Mate, Mr Stubb makes a joke of it & declares that Ahab is fine captain & any man aboard the Pequod would rather be kicked by Ahab than knighted by the queen of England. So the hunt for Moby Dick continues & the fate of the Pequod & its crew is sealed.

On the face of it, this is a story to warm the heart of any anti-whaling campaigner. If there had been a few demon whales to discourage whalers, the extermination of these incredible animals might not have gone so far. This isn't real life though. This is mad Ahab's all consuming obsession. Moby Dick does appear to be indestructible. The Nemesis of Captain Ahab is an irresistible force of nature. Ahab cannot tolerate the notion that a mere animal - a brute - could be beyond his control, could almost destroy him, could reduce him to a powerless cripple. He's a charismatic captain & even without the flattery & bribery the sailors would follow him. And he exploits that power to risk them all in his quest for vengeance & to regain the sense of control he had before Moby Dick took his leg & tore soul & body until they bled into each other.

Excellent film. A story with depth. Wonderful characters. Good acting. Fine cinematography. Just one small criticism : there are no subtitles & they would have been helpful on a couple of occasions.

Gregory Peck was an American film actor. Born Eldred Gregory Peck in La Jolla, California, he was the son of a Missouri mother & a chemist called Gregory Peck, whose mother Catherine Ashe was an Irish immigrant from County Kerry. Catherine Ashe was related to the Irish patriot Thomas Ashe, who took part in the Irish Easter Rising in the year of Pecks birth & died on hunger strike in 1917. Pecks parents divorced when he was five & he was reared by his grandmother. Peck was sent to a Roman Catholic military school in Los Angeles at the age of 10. When he graduated, he went to San Diego State University, but dropped out a year later. For a short time, he took a job driving a truck for an oil company. In 1936, he enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of California, Berkeley. He majored in English & rowed on the university crew. He was recruited by the schools Little Theater & appeared in five plays his senior year. After graduation, Peck dropped the name Eldred & headed to New York City in 1939 to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Posters Of Gregory Peck

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John Huston was an American film director. He was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, the son of the Canadian-born actor Walter Huston. He began his film career as a screenwriter & made films mainly from proven books or plays. He acted in a number of films, with distinction in Otto Preminger s The Cardinal & in Roman Polanskis Chinatown. John Huston is the father of actress Anjelica Huston. In 1941, Huston was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay for The Maltese Falcon & again in 1948 for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was also an accomplished painter who created the 1982 label for Château Mouton Rothschild. He is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California. Posters Of Marilyn Monroe

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