Moby Dick

Herman Melville’s famous story of a man’s dark obsession to kill a whale, told with tremendous range and rhetoric in his great novel, “Moby Dick”, has been put on the screen by John Huston in a rolling and thundering color film that is herewith devoutly recommended as one of the great motion pictures of our times. Readers of Melville’s mighty opus will be pleased and encouraged to learn that Mr. Huston has caged its lengthy discourse in a picture that runs under two hours and pulls all its vast and murky meanings into the focusing “I” of one man. Now the intent of Captain Ahab to fetch up with Moby Dick, is the entire motivation of the lean and violent drama that unfolds. Ahab’s consuming passion for revenge on the fabulous beast that has mutilated his body on a previous voyage and filled his soul with hate is the only inspiration conveyed to his zealous crew. And so all the deep, symbolic ponderings of human agony and fate that course through the length of Melville’s saga are in this one orbit in the film. (Bosley Crowther, “The New York Times”, 1956)

Supporting film: VIVE LA BALEINE