Moby Dick (1956 film) eyes. The head apparatus which could move like a rocking horse was employed when actors were in the water with the whale. Gregory Peck's last speech is delivered in the studio while riding the white whale's hump (a hole was drilled in the side of the whale so Peck could conceal his real leg). The "Pequod" was portrayed by, appropriately, the "Moby Dick". Built in England in 1887 as the "Ryelands", the ship came into the hands of the film industry in the 50s, and was also used in "Treasure Island". It was destroyed by fire in Morecambe, England in
Ishmael (Moby-Dick) complained as early as 1941 that "most of the criticism of our past masters has been perfunctorily tacked onto biographies" and objected to the "modern fallacy" of the "direct reading of an author's personal life into his works." In 1948 Howard P. Vincent, in his study "The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick", "warned against forgetting the narrator." Robert Zoellner says that "traditional criticism" argues that Ishmael's role as narrator "breaks down" either when Ahab and Stubb "have a conversation off by themselves" in chapter 29 or else when Ishmael reports "the soliloquy of Ahab sitting alone" in chapter 37. Ishmael (Moby-Dick) Ishmael