Ernest Dickerson on MOBY DICK

[@kamuelalee]

Amazing film! One of John Huston's greatest movies with a perfect script and cast. Gregory Peck IS Ahab!!

[@oobrocks]

Best review I've seen on this: bravo!

[@sachaput]

I loved that film. Read the novel well over a half dozen times and Huston captures it in a single film as well as he could.

[@spockboy]

Between this and Boys From Brazil, goody-two shoes handsome leading man Peck, is superb in the role of a dark character.

[@theman2017inc]

So true, Peck proved he could do dark as he did in this classic portraying Ahab as well as Mengele in The Boys From Brazil. Though Peck winning the Oscar as Atticus Finch, a goody-two shoes role was well deserved.

[@minik746]

I agree it's one of John Huston's greatest movies. Gregory Peck's performance was perfect and John Huston knew that too.

[@gonzostick]

Great commentary. The Twilight Time Blu-ray restores the look of the original Four-strip Technicolor prints. Unfortunately, disc is out of print, and copies on eBay are expensive. Great film.

[@mandolindleyroadshow706]

I saw the same showing of Moby Dick as Dickerson. I watched it Monday-Thursday in 1965. I wanted to see it on Friday too, but Million Dollar Movie wasn't on that night. Talk about disappointment. And, like Dickerson, Moby Dick helped inspire me to become an independent filmmaker.

[@chrismorrison3696]

What a fantastic review! You speak to EXPRESS rather than most who only talk to IMPRESS. Love your choice edits your language and insightful comments as well as information I didn't know. Good job ED!

[@MrKRUB123]

As a kid I was more scared of Ahab than the whale. I still am.

[@gforce1138]

I can't agree w/ you more, can't remember where I 1st saw it but never miss a chance to see it again. Last time via Tubi a few months ago, for me this is & always will be the Best Movie Version & I have read Melville's Book..❤

[@lorenzobeckmann3736]

Gregory Peck - irreplacable

[@oobrocks]

A very underrated film....young people won't like it due to it's dated FX...a story of obsession

[@markelijio6012]

Elaine Wilkes, North Carolina, October 1994: Moby Dick is a very effective film...perhaps more people like myself who won't like it due to it's dated FX...a story of obsession.

[@JOEMORRISSEY70]

Great movie and I too thought Peck's performance was perfect. As for the Million Dollar Movie. In the fifties and early sixties when local networks in major markets like New York and L.A. struggled to create programming they block booked entire libraries from various studios like RKO, EARLING, and even TOHO to fill their air time. So as a consequence we got to see a lot of movies. And yes, they'd run them five nights a week but when I first saw The Crimson Pirate I didn't mind. Watched it ever night.

[@henrygonzalez8793]

Wow - it’s so good to run across someone who remembers Million Dollar Movie ! It was shown on WOR, Channel 9 in New York. As I recall the theme music was the beautiful theme from Gone With the Wind, though that was not known to me at the time. One of the earliest and finest films I watched on MDM was the original King Kong. I must have been about 8 or 9 years old and I got to see it numerous times. Great memories.

[@CaminoAir]

The film's reputation (I've only seen it once - about 30 years ago) is mixed. The cast are excellent and it's very visually impressive. I can understand why it would leave an impression on Ernest Dickerson. It's unfortunate that Richard Basehart didn't have a bigger career.

[@gpwerner]

Blame the McCarthy blacklist for that.

[@malafakka8530]

Love this movie. My favorite scenes are between Ahab and Starbuck in Ahab's cabin and on the morning after the storm. And yes, of course, the scene when Ahab is on Moby Dick's back, stabbing and cursing it with as much hatred as he can muster. Was there ever a character who hated as intensely as Ahab? Such poetry.

[@katiebayliss9887]

Malafakka I think AM from I Have No Mouth, and I must scream is pretty good at hate.

[@malafakka8530]

Katie Bayliss I never heard of it. Thanks for the tip. I might check it out at some time.

[@robertbanach2881]

I could never get over Gregory Peck looking like Abe Lincoln in this film.

[@Music--ng8cd]

Abe Lincoln, Whale Hunter

[@Sagurasu]

I was a child when this was first released and I wanted so much for my parents to take me to the Drive-In where it was playing. Nope, instead we went to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." Years later I finally saw it!

[@malafakka8530]

Not a bad movie either 😉

[@kamuelalee]

That's a good movie too!

[@maxthepupp]

I think the case can be made that 20,000Leaugues is a more likeable movie!

[@watchword1354]

Great review.

[@Music--ng8cd]

Nice Soundtrack from Phillip Sainton as well

[@Music--ng8cd]

Essex was an American whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, which was launched in 1799. In 1820, while at sea in the southern Pacific Ocean under the command of Captain George Pollard Jr., the ship was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale. Thousands of miles from the coast of South America with little food and water, the 21-man crew was forced to make for land in the ship's surviving whaleboats. The men suffered severe dehydration, starvation, and exposure on the open ocean, and the survivors eventually resorted to eating the bodies of the crewmen who had died. When that proved insufficient, members of the crew drew lots to determine whom they would sacrifice so that the others could live. Seven crew members were cannibalized before the last of the eight survivors were rescued, more than three months after the sinking of the Essex. First mate Owen Chase and cabin boy Thomas Nickerson later wrote accounts of the ordeal. The tragedy attracted international attention, and inspired Herman Melville to write his famous 1851 novel Moby-Dick.

[@marks_sparks1]

and the 1964 Cold War flick The Bedford Incident wasn't a bad interpretation of Melvilles book, with Widmark a very realistic Ahab.

[@modelnut617]

The scenes of killing whales were real. Director John Huston commissioned real whale hunts to be filmed for the 1956 movie Moby Dick. The Portuguese whalers of Madeira Island were followed and filmed in action off the coast of Caniçal, a traditional whaling parish in the Madeira Islands. The bloody scenes from the hunts were then used in the movie.

[@lamecasuelas2]

An interesting little fact: William Friedkin pased The french connection trough some sort of video processing when he was surpervisiong the remaster for the Blu ray- according to him he did It because he saw a connection between Captain Ahab and Popeye. In a way the french Connection Is His versión of Moby dick with the pursue of the drug dealers functioning as a sort of allegory for the bigbwhale. Unfortunatelly everybody, including the cinematographer hated that máster because It looks like a high Def versión of a VHS copy, still i think that's a unique desition that maybe could have worked if they had released it as a sort of companion piece rather than as the official versión.

[@philmfan]

They did a pretty good job cramming a long, complex novel - some say THE great American novel - into the confines of a standard length Hollywood film. Even though Huston was a great director, someone today could possibly get even more of the novel into a same sized package or manage to make a longer film of it that remained compelling, purely due to changes in film technique that allow for more experimentation and less exposition, but there are simply no directors today who are up to the task IMO, at least none willing to take a crack at Moby Dick. Consequently, limitations of the time (purely for state of technique alone) considered, this is an excellent, unfairly and inaccurately maligned adaptation. As with Dickerson, it's one of my favorites and many scenes have lost none of their impact over the years. Basehart was well-cast, the portrayal of Quequeg much better than the overly accurate islander portrayal from the tv film, Royal Dano as Elisha a high point, really excellent cast all around. And a master class in adaptive screenwriting from Bradbury. The remastered Twilight Time disc, while not perfect, is probably the closest to a perfect presentation we'll ever see of this often overlooked classic. Yeah, that's what I said - a CLASSIC!

[@puck30]

Million Dollar Movie, saw a lot of great movies on the old channel 9. And when MDM wasn't on you could watch the other horror show. New York Mets Baseball.😱

[@Blaqjaqshellaq]

Someone said that they should have cast Orson Welles as Ahab and Gregory Peck as the preacher!

[@gforce1138]

Actually he did play the preacher in a later movie...

[@iasimov5960]

Based on a true story.

[@SRV2013]

I always thought that they should have dumped Peck, let John Huston play Ahab and let Orson Welles direct this film. Then it would have been something.

[@aljackson127]

The critics raked Peck over the coals when the film came out, over the years I have changed my mind about Peck, there are clunky moments, but most the time he does a good job.

[@ValkyrieZiege]

😏Ray Bradbury is a great writer, not a screen-writer. 🤣 By-the-way, we of us are all "multi-racial". It's just that most of us aren't arrogant about it.

[@sussy_riddick1235]

Eww why it say that