alr

Moby Dick

Screening on Film
Directed by John Huston.
With Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Orson Welles.
UK, 1956, 35mm, color, 116 min.

Critically acclaimed but a failure commercially, Huston's ambitious adaptation of Melville's maritime epic began with a screenplay by the celebrated science-fiction novelist Ray Bradbury (revised in production by Huston). While shifting discursive details into action and transforming speculative rumination into dialogue, Huston's Moby Dick remains extraordinarily faithful to the tone of the book and to its perilous portrayal of the whaling industry. The film is notable not only for its pronounced mid-nineteenth-century look and what critic Bosley Crowthers described as its "strange, subdued color scheme" (achieved by desaturating the Technicolor stock with a matching black-and-white negative) but for the visceral quality of its action sequences, which frequently placed Huston and his crew in real peril.

Part of film series

Read more

Treasures from the Harvard Film Archive: Directors E–J

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait