|
The key precedent is Honda's Godzilla, thus Bikini Atoll for the rendezvous with annihilation. Elemental forces are to be challenged, the New England church is full of memorial plaques for the seamen who did, the camera pans across the congregation then tilts up to the pulpit shaped like a ship's prow. (Jonah is the inescapable sermon subject, Orson Welles as Father Mapple rattles the rafters with his sonorous reading.) Ishmael (Richard Basehart) meets Queequeg (Friedrich von Ledebur) in the inn's bed, "better a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian," they're off to join the crew of the Pequod in the morning. "Our supreme lord and dictator," Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) fueled by thunderstruck vengeance against the monstrous white whale. "Death, men, you've seen him. It's Moby Dick." John Huston can't touch the monumental Melville metaphysics, still he finds his sweet spot between Illustrated Classics tastefulness and the vivid hardiness of physical cinema. He continues the Moulin Rouge's experiments by desaturating Technicolor to evoke the world through a leviathan's impassive orb, or at least engravings corroded by brine. (Solar glare reflected off a doubloon and greens from Saint Elmo's fire complement the ashen-beige palette.) Starbuck (Leo Genn) learns rationality has no place in "the madness of the chase," Captain Boomer (James Robertson Justice) adds a jocular note by matching his hook hand to Ahab's ivory peg-leg: "Lubbers with four limbs don't know what they're missing, eh?" An uncanny becalmed ocean (flapping sails, multiplying seagulls) sets the stage for the climactic vortex, a floating coffin delivers the teller of the tale. "The drama's done." Rohmer's Cahiers review has no use for any of this, but Herzog gives Huston his due in Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. With Harry Andrews, Bernard Miles, Noel Purcell, Edric Connor, Mervyn Johns, Joseph Tomelty, Francis de Wolff, Philip Stainton, Seamus Kelly, Royal Dano, and Tamba Allen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |