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 contains passages embarrassingly similar to passages in "Moby-Dick". The fourth book, Reverend Henry T. Cheever's "The Whale and His Captors" (1850), was used for two episodes in "Moby-Dick" but probably appeared too late in the writing of the novel to be of much more use. Melville did plunder a fifth book, William Scoresby, Jr., "An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery" (1820), though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the Greenland whale rather than the sperm whale. Although the book became the standard whaling reference soon after publication, Melville satirized and