Word: ishmael
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Melville's 500 pages into a not over-long screenplay, Huston and Ray Bradbury have done a job that is unqualifiedly brilliant. They have followed the plot and the characterizations faithfully, and have even shown a welcome respect for the spoken word--in the sermon by Father Mapple, in Ishmael's intermittent narration, and in numerous speeches by Ahab that are taken almost verbatim from the book. At the same time, realizing that the camera and the pen are by no means interchangeable storytellers, they have not hesitated to take beneficial liberties with the novel. In Peter Coffin...
With the egregious exception of Peck, the acting is very good indeed. Richard Basehart gives Ishmael the appropriate detached air, and Leo Genn correctly looks torns between two duties as Starbuck, a sort of former-day Caine Mutineer. Friedrich Ledebur, as Queeqeug, is probably as good an authority as anyone on how a cannibal should act. And, oh yes!--the whale is great...
...furnacelike heat of the North African summer, the Moslem holy day of Aid el Kebir rolled around. On that day the heads of Moslem families sacrifice a ram in memory of Abraham's sacrifice of a male sheep in place of his son Ishmael, ancestor of all Arabs. One ram, the most important of all, is ceremoniously knifed by the Sultan, who is regarded by the Arabs and Berbers of French Morocco as their spiritual and temporal sovereign. On Aid el Kebir last week, the knife was wielded not by Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef (who had reigned since...
Author Greene sometimes wrenches his story to underline his idea: Krogh, for example, becomes a conventional stereotype of the rich man too busy to be happy. But in Anthony Farrant he has created an unforgettable character, a bewildered and pathetic Ishmael who personifies the moral shabbiness to which Greene has repeatedly returned in his later, better books...
...whole, the play is pretty good, and is certainly worth four pages and twenty minutes' reading time. The longer speeches of Hawthorne and Melville, which are the poetry of the play, read very well, both as poetry and as dialogue. The three words, by the way, are "Call me Ishmael...