Happy 50th Birthday, MD

John Huston's MOBY DICK was released fifty years ago this past summer. It opened at New York's Sutton Theater July 4th, 1956 weekend to mostly lavish praise (most notably Bosley Crowther's NY Times review). Unfortunately, the film did not garner a wide audience, as Warner Bros. executives partially expected (they had feared there wouldn't be a broad audience for what amounts to an all-male ensemble piece). John Huston was bitterly disappointed, as he felt it was his best film (The film's only award, I believe, was from the NY Critics).

The film suffered a few other casualties as Huston went into a career slump for four years (finally revived in 1960 with THE MISFITS). In 1957, after they attempted to make a film of Herman Melville's novel, "Typee," Huston and Gregory Peck had a falling out which was never resolved, and finally, Huston could not find the backing to make his 50's vision of THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, starring Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart (he finally realized this Rudyard Kipling story in 1975 starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine).

Nearly all of the priciple players in this film are no longer with us. Among the production personnel still alive are cinematographer, Oswald Morris, script clerk, Angela Allen and screenwriter, Ray Bradbury.