Moby Dick (1956 film)
1956 film by John Huston
Moby Dick is a 1956 adventure film directed and produced by John Huston, adapted by Huston and Ray Bradbury from Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick. It stars Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, Richard Basehart as Ishmael, and Leo Genn as Starbuck, with supporting performances by James Robertson Justice, Harry Andrews, Bernard Miles, Noel Purcell and Orson Welles as Father Mapple.
A co-production of the United Kingdom and the United States, the film was distributed by Warner Bros. on June 27, 1956. It received positive reviews from critics and audiences and was a commercial success. The National Board of Review ranked the film in its Top 10 Films at their 1956 awards, with Huston winning Best Director and Basehart winning for Best Supporting Actor. Huston was nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film at the 9th Directors Guild of America Awards.
Plot
In 1841, a sailor named Ishmael heads to the New England town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to sign on a whaling ship. In the inn where he is staying for the night, he is forced to share his room with a Pacific Islander and harpooner named Queequeg, whom he befriends after a tense first meeting. The next morning, the two of them hire onto a whaling ship named Pequod, which is commanded by grim Captain Ahab, who is obsessed with hunting and killing a legendary white-skinned whale named Moby Dick, who was responsible for severing Ahab's left leg.
“Moby Dick (1956 film)” enters the record as 1956 film by John Huston. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Moby, Dick and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1423235. VIAF identifies the subject as 180901458. The Library of Congress control number is no2006019517. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1851 and 1841.
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This entry incorporates text from “Moby Dick (1956 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.