MOBY DICK directed by John Huston (USA, 1956)
There’s is some dispute about screenwriter Ray Bradbury’s experience of Herman Melville’s epic novel. According to Wiki he confessed to John Huston that he’d never managed to get through the whole book, echoing the feelings of many readers, including me.
However, a strongly contradictory perspective is given by Philip Hoare. Writing in Leviathan, Hoare claims that Bradbury “read the book nine times and wrote fifteen hundred pages of script to reach a final one hundred and fifty”.
I suspect the truth may lie someway in between these two accounts. Huston is credited as co-writer and my gut feeling is that the director had a more intuitive grasp of the source material than the Sci-Fi author.
Either way, reducing the scope and complexity of the novel to a feature length film is a daunting and nigh on impossible task. Continue reading
A movie that traumatised me as a child was one where the lead character (Gregory Peck) has a phobia about seeing sets of parallel lines against a white background. I found something chilling about simple images (fork marks on a table cloth – the design on bedsheets) setting off a traumatic reaction. The cause of this paranoia is only clear at the end. It was only years after first seeing the movie (from behind the sofa) at the age of about seven that I identified it as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound.
