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While you could argue that Moby Dick is one of those books that should never be made into a movie, John Huston and his collaborators gave it a good try in 1956. They revealed no new discoveries in Melville’s book, but that isn’t for lack of ambition or imagination. Failure was almost assured, but it did not result from disrespect or incompetence. Indeed, the effort to be true to the novel’s spirit may be partly to blame for the film’s unevenness.

For one of its most obvious characteristics is to graft the physical and natural realities of early 19th century whaling on to religious allusions as a kind of springboard from which the story’s epic vision can take flight. As dour New England Puritanism competes with the earthy excesses of hard-living sailors, however, things start to go wrong almost immediately. When Ishmael (Richard Basehart) arrives in New Bedford, self-consciously stylized speech (co-written by Huston and Ray Bradbury) is thick with equal parts Biblical reference and helpings of grog. The result of the combination is a struggle just to understand. The milieu is both archaic and exotic, but the more detailed the atmosphere becomes, the harder it is for the story’s fabulistic power to resonate.

While these confused currents are most pronounced in the early scenes, and things pick up when the Pequod sets sail, the contradictions do not disappear so much as simmer. Basehart tries hard to make Ishmael our surrogate, but he is more a witness than a participant. The real protagonist is, of course, Ahab (Gregory Peck), but a psychopath is sympathetic only if we can be sucked into his or her obsession. Peck is just too sane an actor to make Ahab come to life. He gives taut tension to some of the more highly flown rhetoric, and his final moments strapped to the whale, waving the crew forward with his limp arm, are chillingly horrific. Otherwise, Peck’s Ahab inspires more ambivalence than sympathy with his obsession and since none of the other characters, even Starbuck (Leo Genn), pick up the slack, the results feel rather tentative.

Ahab’s madness precedes his arrival, not just in the rumors whispered about him by the other characters, but in our foreknowledge of the story. In short, the challenge of vivifying Ahab’s insanity is nothing compared to overcoming the myth of Moby Dick itself. Adapting any great novel to the screen is fraught, but when the book has totemic significance in the history of literature, the difficulties are virtually insoluble. The film cannot hope to equal the novel’s importance, much less its mythic status. So even the most respectful adaptation has to offer something the original cannot provide to have independent interest. Huston and company use the medium’s resources to give the book’s famous story physical and historical tangibility. That is enough to make the film worth watching, but it is well short of transcendent obsession.