Richard Baseheart looks and sounds more like a steward on the "Q.E.2" than a crewman on a whaler.Orson Welles doesn't so much chew the scenery as liposuction it.He had played Ahab in his own production on the London stage and it might have been a good idea for him to have exchanged roles with Gregory Peck who really lacks the juice that it needed. Sundry British character actors rhubarb around cheerily and the set of the whaling town looks like something left over from "Greyfriars Bobby". Despite these rather fundamental flaws John Huston kicks arse and takes names to such good effect that "Moby Dick" is a much better movie than it could have been given what he had to be getting on with. The "Pequod" is well-realised,it looks and sounds right.Some of the shipboard scenes are reminiscent of a badly-made pirate movie however. I must admit I am a little confused by the highly laudatory reviews on the previous pages.Many of them seem more concerned with the book than the film,but,compared to the novel,no filmmaker on earth could ever produce anything more than "Moby Dick Lite" because of the obvious limitations of the medium.Like Howard Hawks,John Huston is most effective portraying a predominantly male environment and the women in this film have little to do but stand around looking sad.Mr Huston's greatest achievement here is to coax a sympathetic and quietly stirring performance from Leo Genn,a steady but hardly charismatic actor. The sound recording is outstanding,well mixed and well balanced. Like many Huston films it is a mixture of the good and the ordinary,the director seeming to lose interest before the end,thinking ahead perhaps to his next project. If you think of it less as an adaptation of a great novel,more as a movie about catching whales it's not so bad.
Review of Moby Dick
