Word: pecked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...madman beget madmen," Starbuck declares as the chase after Moby Dick is nearing its end, and as Captain Ahab is firing the crew of the Pequod to a frenzy of excitement. The trouble is that Starbuck does not really see a madman. He sees Gregory Peck...
This is almost a great movie; Peck's portrayal of Ahab is virtually all that's wrong with it. The flaw is a considerable one, however, since an impassive, insipid Ahab robs Melville's story of its hottest fire and its deepest meaning. Peck is just utterly miscast. For one thing, he is too young, giving no impression whatever of having seen "forty years and one thousand lowerings" on whaling ships. His bland face has nothing of the torn, tortured, gnawed-at, fiery look that Ahab should have. Rather, as he paces the Pequod's deck, his long strides, suspenders...
...Peck's failure to put any fire into Ahab impairs the movie in all sorts of ways. Melville's words suffer somewhat from the drawling, rather lazy articulation that the Captain gives them. There is also a certain loss of credibility, since Peck's businesslike exhortations to the crew could not conceivably move them to the state of excitement that director John Huston has them exhibit. More important, the movie's phlegmatic Ahab could never, never be the magnetic, crazed, God-challenging hero of Melville's book--the character on whom the essence of the novel's supernatural, symbolical...
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...
...labor was on the way out when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and made it profitable to keep huge tracts of land in cultivation. Even so, a rich planter might clear no more than a 1% profit annually. A representative weekly food ration for a slave was "a peck of meal, three pounds of bacon, and a pint of molasses." The housing rule of thumb on the plantations was six Negroes to one room, usually 16 ft. by 18 ft. in size, but the log cabin Lincoln grew up in was meaner than some slave quarters...