Moby Dick (1956 film) Moby Dick (1956 film) Moby Dick is a 1956 film adaptation of Herman Melville's novel "Moby-Dick". It was directed by John Huston with a screenplay by Huston and Ray Bradbury. The film starred Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, and Leo Genn. The music score was written by Philip Sainton. Set in 19th-century New England, the story follows the whaling ship "Pequod" and its crew. Leading them is Captain Ahab, who was almost killed in an encounter with the "great white whale", Moby Dick, which bit off much of his left leg. Now he is out for revenge. With the crew that
Moby-Dick mention of the composition of what became "Moby-Dick" is the final paragraph of the letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850: Some scholars have concluded that Melville composed "Moby-Dick" in two or even three stages. Reasoning from a series of inconsistencies and structural developments in the final version, they hypothesize that the work he mentioned to Dana was, in the words of Lawrence Buell, a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure, but that reading Shakespeare and his encounters with Hawthorne inspired him to rewrite it as "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions". Bezanson objects that the letter