Word: pequod
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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...
...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, beard, and melancholy, almost soft, expression remind the viewer more of one of Ahab's prominent but quite contrasting contemporaries--Abe Lincoln...
...appropriate. And Huston controls the dramatic pace effectively, starting slowly in the New Bedford scenes, mixing in increasingly explicit predictions of doom, and constantly quickening the tempo until at the end, in the storm scene and the final fight with Moby Dick, the action grips not just the Pequod's crew but the audience as well...