Wandering through New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, I see a flyer for a stage production of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The above-the-title blurb from The New Yorker reads, “Appropriately Pure.” I don’t even know what that means. Then I read that the show will be performed “without irony or clothing” — and that helps, a bit.
Here’s a less enigmatic take on another adapted classic, John Huston’s 1956 film version of Melville’s Moby-Dick: “The only description I can come up with for anyone who doesn’t love this film is ‘wack-job.'” (That’s from a Netflix member review.) From another Netflix member:
It was good enough it flew by and seemed about 20 minutes long to me. How would this movie be with other captains . . . say . . . Bogart or Pee Wee Herman? Who knows? I can only review the movie I saw.
In the midst of a Melville kick, I watched the unhyphenated Moby Dick for the first time a few days ago. Huston and Ray Bradbury co-wrote the script; Gregory Peck plays Ahab. (Plays, though, may be the wrong verb. There’s nothing playful about Peck’s weighty-anchor performance.) The movie offers all sorts of eerily sensuous moments: the drone of coffin-making; the sight of Ahab’s scar, catching the light. (“I’d strike the sun,” Peck booms, “if it insulted me.” Instead the sun brings out the glow in his cheeks, the glower in his eyes.) And Orson Welles! As Father Mapple! Sermonizing behind a harpoon-cross! You don’t hear voices like those of Welles and Peck these days. Nobody ever says, “Brad Pitt! What pipes!”
Leo Genn has a strong turn as Starbuck, who, in a mid-voyage moment of clarity, reaches for his revolver — but who later becomes, like the rest of the crew, infected by Ahab’s mania. As for Peck’s final ride on the White Whale: it put me in mind of Slim Pickens, at the end of Dr. Strangelove, hat-waving his way to oblivion.
As much as I appreciate Huston’s version of Melville, I like Guy Ben-Ner’s even better. MASS MoCA is presenting a major survey exhibition of the Israeli-born artist’s work this summer; his silent twelve-minute Moby Dick, starring himself and his then six-year-old daughter, is one of several occasionally brilliant films running in constant loop. Any man who terrorizes an Ikea is OK by me.
An equally outr?? version of the novel: Dopey Dick: The Pink Whale, featuring Woody Woodpecker. (Melville! Such language! Even when that language is Portuguese!)
One wonders what Melville would’ve thought of his story line being so often recast. (Perhaps there’s even a nude — though not irony-free — version in the works. Harpoontang, anyone?) But I think it’s all for the best: anything to keep the masterwork, and the master, afloat. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” Melville grumbled in a letter to Hawthorne, “I should die in the gutter.” This is an author, remember, whose 1892 New York Times obituary referred to the forgotten novelist “Henry Melville.” The mistake was “corrected,” if that’s the word, by blurring out all but the “H” in “Henry.”
