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 data on whales and whaling in five books, the most important of which was by the English ship's surgeon Thomas Beale, "Natural History of the Sperm Whale" (1839), a book of reputed authority which Melville bought on July 10, 1850. "In scale and complexity," scholar Steven Olsen-Smith writes, "the significance of [this source] to the composition of "Moby-Dick" surpasses that of any other source book from which Melville is known to have drawn." According to scholar Howard P. Vincent, the general influence of this source is to supply the arrangement of whaling data in chapter groupings. Melville followed Beale's grouping