Moby Dick

Moby Dick (1930) is profoundly strange re-imagining of Melville's novel, adapted for the requirements of early sound-era Hollywood.  Curiously, the film shows no reverence for its source materials and ruthlessly changes plot elements, characters, and, indeed, much of the whole mood and texture of the original novel.  By contrast, John Huston's version starring Gregory Peck was a rigorous and faithful adaptation of the book -- the product, it seems, of a very different era.  Moby Dick wasn't well-known in the early part of this century and the book was regarded by many, including most critics, as a sort of sea-tale (on the order of Dana's Two Years Before the Mast) ruined by Melville's extravagant style.  The 1930 film feels minor on most levels -- it's not ambitious and doesn't take itself seriously:  the film seems cheaply made and doesn't aspire to art.  Rather, it's just a raunchy pre-code movie similar to the populsar Lon Chaney vehicles made around the same time that it resembles -- this version of Moby Dick is a rambunctious comedy mixed with some horror elements; it doesn't bear much resemblance to Melville's book.

Directed by Lloyd Bacon, the picture is generally shot as a silent film -- it has dialogue but the words are hard to hear, and, in fact, sometimes botched as delivered.  The movie is vehicle for John Barrymore who plays the showy part of Ahab.  Joan Bennett plays the romantic interest -- something that might puzzle you:  how can it be that you have forgotten about a love affair between Ahab and Father Mapple's comely daughter?  Well, of course, you haven't forgotten those chapters in the book -- they don't exist and the love affair is simply invented from the whole cloth.  This movie has no Ishmael -- Ahab is, more or less, the hero.  It's particularly baffling that the book has no white whale either -- although Moby Dick is said to be white, he appears jet black or, at least, grey in the scenes in which he is featured.  The picture is a sort of prequel to the action narrated by Ishmael in the novel.  A whaling vessel docks at New Bedford -- a simian fellow is doing monkey-bar athletics high atop the main-mast.   This turns out to be the leering and womanizing Ahab played by Barrymore.  Derek is Ahab's long-suffering and conventional brother -- he is romancing Father Mapple's daughter.  But the girl rejects his proposal of marriage in favor of her true love, the rounder and charming sea scoundrel, Ahab.  There's some amusing byplay with a cute Saint Bernard puppy and a romantic misunderstanding -- Ahab is not willing to steal his brother's fiancee and so he pretends not to like the beautiful young woman even though she is clearly enamored with him.  (This is a pre-code film and so there's a blowsy prostitute who tries to seduced Ahab; Ahab's arm is covered with obscene tattoos of nude women and, at one point, he slaps a fat girl on the rump making some kind of unseemly comment about "liking her blubber.")  After the preacher's daughter declares her love to Ahab, he agrees to marry her when he comes back from a three-year whaling voyage.  During this trip, Moby Dick gnaws off Ahab's leg.  We see some gory images of the mutilated leg and, then, there is a harrowing sequence in which a blacksmith cauterizes the stump with a red hot harpoon.  Ahab now feels that he has been maimed and can not marry his fiancee -- there's are some Lon Chaney-style scenes in which he tries to jam his bleeding stump into a prosthetic peg leg.  The film shows lots of suffering and has a subtext that Ahab's fiancee, probably like many young women after the First World War, will have to overcome her repugnance at her fiancee's mutilation in order to marry him.  Ahab is bitter and concludes that his fiancee has abandoned him -- he goes to sea again seeking vengeance on the white whale.  This time Ahab has staffed his ship with miscreants shanghaied from "dram shops and brothels" and the crew is, indeed, a motley group of cut throats -- including Ahab's loyal factotum and lieutenant, the heathen Queequeg played brilliantly by the famous African-American actor, Noble Johnson.  Unbeknownst to Ahab, the crew includes his disgruntled brother Derek who has become a drunk since losing his fiance to his brother.  There's a spectacular storm at sea with a pale water-spout spooking its way over the tumult of wind and wave -- Ahab gets into a brutal fight during the tempest with his brother and ends up breaking his back.  The next day, Moby Dick breaches and Ahab goes in pursuit of the whale, finally killing the beast in a gory scene.  Ahab comes back to New Bedford, his thirst for revenge slaked.  He can now marry Joan Bennett and all's well that ends well.  (The film inexplicably forgets about poor Derek, left with his back broken after the titanic affray with Ahab.)

The movie is only 71 minutes long.  The special effects involving the whale seem to involve a boat powered by a outboard motor concealed within the shell of a whale's head and fins.  There's a lot of unconvincing rear-projection.  The creature effects are limited because the whale is singularly unconvincing from all camera angles.  The horror movie aspects of the film are quite emphatic -- we see Ahab limping around, a miserable black shadow that looks a little like the vampire played by Lon Chaney in the lost film London after Midnight.  The film's pre-code elements are startling -- there's a scene with a hootchy-kootch dancer in Singapore that is inserted in the film just to show an exotic Chinese whore house and some skin.  Ahab himself sneers at the whores.  Joan Bennett is fantastically beautiful and appealing in her role, but it's underwritten and consists of her saying hello and, then, goodbye to Ahab on two occasions, ending with falling into a clinch with the embittered 

Ahab who has now been domesticated into a sort of house-husband, just a regular guy.  Before this ending, Ahab shakes hands with Queequeg and says he's a "damned good heathen."  The film is an interesting curiosity and worth seeing, perhaps, for some of its pre-Code bawdiness but there's not much to the movie.