John Huston

John Huston appears chiefly as the director of the 1954 film adaptation of Moby Dick, a production whose crafted images struggle to contain the reality of the animal at its centre. The book first recalls the film as an unsatisfying childhood viewing experience, then returns to it with a changed understanding: Huston’s mixture of theatrical artifice and footage of actual whaling makes the movie’s final scenes an uneasy encounter with the history the fiction transformed.

The 1954 Production

Huston made his film in Britain and Ireland rather than in New England. For the production, he requisitioned an 1870 schooner that had recently served as the Hispanola in Walt Disney’s Treasure Island. The vessel was fitted out at St Andrew’s Dock in Hull, where chandlers contributed original harpoons discovered in their lofts. The ship thereby carried material traces of whaling into a film production that was itself far from the places associated with the novel.

The schooner was then sailed to Ireland’s west coast. Huston chose to shoot only on overcast days, seeking a gloomy visual atmosphere. That decision set the production’s tone through conditions of light and weather rather than through a wholly artificial studio setting. The film’s appearance was also shaped by cinematographer Oswald Morris, whose method combined two sets of negatives, one monochrome and one Technicolor, to suggest that the story had been filmed in 1843, the period in which it takes place.

Adaptation and First Reception

Philip Hoare remembers seeing Huston’s film as a young boy and finding it wordy and dull. The family television, an old-fashioned black-and-white set with grainy 405-line reception, did little to reveal the subtlety of Morris’s visual approach. Nor did the young viewer recognize the labour behind Ray Bradbury’s screenplay: Bradbury read the novel nine times and drafted fifteen hundred pages of script before reducing it to a final one hundred and fifty. The book records that he described the work as burdened by a profound depression and by the weight of Herman Melville’s book.

The film’s adaptation of the novel also had a theatrical dimension. Orson Welles played Father Mapple in a deliberately histrionic pulpit scene, performed at Shepperton. In 1955, Welles staged his own version of Moby Dick at the Hackney Empire in London’s East End. Hoare may have recognized Richard Basehart as Ishmael because of his later role as a submarine captain in A Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, where he battles a giant squid. Such later associations made the film’s monsters seem to belong to a broader culture of Cold War science fiction, in which the whale and squid could appear as alien threats from beneath the surface.

The film’s representation of Queequeg likewise registered for the young viewer as frightening. Yet the more fundamental difficulty came when the whale finally appeared: Huston had recreated Moby Dick as a life-size model, and it proved hard to tell whether the screen image was alive. The contrast between a carefully designed period illusion and a visibly constructed animal would later become part of the book’s account of what the film could—and could not—make present.

The Model Whale and the Reality of Whaling

The model did not remain safely within the bounds of the production. While it was being towed off Fishguard in rough seas, part of the White Whale broke loose. Coastguards warned shipping of a possible navigation hazard, and the Royal Air Force dispatched a flying boat to search for the runaway prop. The episode made the artificial whale, intended to stand in for an immense living creature, a physical hazard in its own right.

For the final scenes, Gregory Peck, playing Ahab, was roped to the ersatz whale. Huston insisted on repeated takes, and Peck nearly drowned. The production’s insistence on repeating the staged encounter thus carried a real risk, even though the whale at its centre was a model. Hoare’s later viewing emphasizes another kind of rupture in these sequences: alongside studio-tank scenes, identifiable by their mismatched waves and lurid back-projected sky, Huston inserted footage of sperm whales being hunted off Madeira.

That documentary footage is where Hoare finds the film closest to the truth. The dying whales’ spouts and the visible evidence of their deaths turn the screen from an arena of staged conflict into a record of actual killing. The film’s emotional force therefore depends not only on its recreation of Ahab’s pursuit, but on an abrupt movement between imitation and evidence. Huston’s constructed White Whale cannot itself supply the reality the story demands; the hunted sperm whales do.

Retrospective Significance

The change in Hoare’s response to Huston’s film is also a change in historical perspective. As a child, Hoare did not connect the nineteenth-century demand for whale oil with the postwar appetite for petroleum. On later viewing, the film’s scenes of pursuit and killing sit within a larger history of extraction, one that does not end with the fictional age of the Pequod.

The book places that reconsideration against the worldwide scale of twentieth-century whaling. In 1951, a century after Moby Dick appeared, more whales were killed in a single year than New Bedford’s whale ships had taken in a century and a half. By the time Hoare revisits the film, the contrast between its nineteenth-century setting and modern industrial whaling is no longer an analogy that can be missed. Huston’s movie, for all its visible artifice, becomes a means of looking at the gap between the whale as a literary adversary and whales as animals killed on a vast scale. Its most consequential images are those in which the staged spectacle gives way to the historical reality of the hunt.