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
Moby-Dick and his works, or at least those that could still be fairly easily obtained or remembered. Other works, especially the poetry, went largely forgotten. In 1917, American author Carl Van Doren became the first of this period to proselytize about Melville's value. His 1921 study, "The American Novel", called "Moby-Dick" a pinnacle of American Romanticism. In his 1923 idiosyncratic but influential "Studies in Classic American Literature", novelist, poet, and short story writer D. H. Lawrence celebrated the originality and value of American authors, among them Melville. Perhaps surprisingly, Lawrence saw "Moby-Dick" as a work of the first order despite his