Moby Dick/Jaws: “Before the shark, there was the whale”

This Herman Melville classic, adapted by John Huston, should have appeared in Steven Spielberg’s film.

Ahab, captain of a whaling ship, has not forgotten his first encounter with Moby Dick. His body bears the traces, his mind too. He only has one idea, to find the white whale. This passionate relentlessness will endanger his crew.

Arte will broadcast a classic adventure film this evening: Moby-Dickof John Huston. A work that has remained famous for its complicated production, then for its significant influence on another reference in the 7th art: Jawsof Steven Spielberg.

In 1956, the director of Maltese Falcon and of The Odyssey of the African Queen finally releases his adaptation of Herman Melville’s book, which he had dreamed of bringing to the screen for several years. He would have liked to offer the role of Captain Ahab to his father, the actor Walter Huston (who had received the Oscar for best supporting role for one of his previous films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), but he died at the very beginning of this decade. He then called on Gregory Peck, popular with the public to Glory days Or Duel in the sun. The film is also famous for the participation of Orson Welles as Father Mapple, before the director of Citizen Kane in turn adapts this flagship work of English-speaking literature, but on stage. Years later, Peck would in turn play this role of man of faith in a mini-series played by Patrick Stewart as a whale hunter.

To complete this broadcast, Arte is also offering a documentary on the resonance of Moby-Dick on current American society:

To adapt Melville’s river novel, John Huston collaborated with Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451 and Martian Chronicles. He chose an Irish port and the Spanish coast as settings to shoot his film, but suffered several setbacks: the animatronic whale was difficult to maneuver, and it sank during a stormy night. The team then fell back on smaller models, filmed in artificial tanks, as well as on a whale head made to life size, with removable eyes.

After several torrential rains causing delays, a major reconstruction of 19th century sets and a larger-than-expected cast of supporting roles, the film ultimately cost double its initial budget: $4.4 million at the time versus 2 million advanced by Moulin Productions (or around 50 million in adjusted currency). What caused the bankruptcy of this firm, which resold Moby-Dick a United Artists, a studio which in turn signed a distribution agreement with Warner Bros, before MGM recovered the rights in 1981.

This difficult filming was also marked by a misunderstanding between the director and his star, Gregory Peck admitting at the end of the 1990s that he had preferred the TV version of Moby-Dickbecause Huston’s lacked, according to him, “breath of adventure”.

Photos from Moby Dick, the mini-series produced by Francis Ford Coppola (1998).

The influence of this adaptation is no less undeniable: without Moby-Dickwould there have been Jaws ? Steven Spielberg officially adapted another work, published by journalist Peter Benchley in the early 1970s, for this film, but he says in the DVD bonuses that he initially wanted to pay homage to this version. He would have liked to introduce the character of Quint, the shark hunter played by Robert Shaw, by showing him watching the Moby-Dick of 1956 and to note some inconsistencies. Gregory Peck, however, refused to allow his image to be reused in the film, explaining that he had been disappointed by the experience, and by his own performance.

Ironically, to promote the release of Moby-Dick on video, in 1976, a year after the phenomenal success of Sea teeth at the box office, United Artists rightly played on the link between these two films. On its new poster, designed especially for the occasion, we can read in English: “Before the Shark, there was the Whale” (“before the shark, there was the whale”), a wink to the “monster” of the seas which terrorized millions of spectators in theaters in 1975. Not to mention that Steven Spielberg also struggled to make his own animatronic aquatic creature work, which pushed him to suggest it more, show it less than what was initially planned. And that ultimately helped scare the public.

Steven Spielberg regrets that sharks have been decimated since Jaws