Moby Dick
It seemed like two different movies, the one in which Orson Wells climbs a rope ladder to a pulpit mimicking a ship and the one where Richard Basehart says call me Ishmael (which I will if you ask but could you work harder to make me believe that you are).
Although the acting was sufficient to convey the story and the screenplay by Ray Bradbury and (co-writer and director) Huston was well done if by necessity pared down a bit lean, I feel the potential of this being a great movie, while approached, was not reached.
It could be that the expectations raised by Wells as Father Mapple were too high for any project to live up to and it is therefore no fault of Gregory Peck that I kept thinking throughout the movie--Gee, he sure is no Orson Wells.
It was good clean fun though and I'm certainly not regretting that it is what I chose to help me while away yesterday evening.
I could say one great fish story reminds me of another except that whales aren't fish and the story I am reminded of isn't that great, nor does it include that many fish.
I can never seem to escape during periods of deep reflection the Fishorama on the former Lake Lewisville north of Dallas. In fact, as often as not if you see me lost in thought or you ask me what I'm thinking about (and I say nothing) I am probably thinking about the Fishorama. It is where I go to visit my father who has been dead coming up on 15 years. And it was 20 years or more before that that we were at the Fishorama together, which was an enclosed barn-like space jutting out into the water, with walkways around 16 or 20 rectangular "fishing holes" protected by painted tubular railings. And chairs, there were chairs to sit in if you were not as eager as I, leaning over the railing looking at my reflection and the always predictable bream near the surface, swimming lazily beneath that reflection.
My father was no great fisherman nor did he pretend to be or as far as I could tell, aspire to hooking fish. It was relatively late in my adolescence that I realized he wasn't much of a ball player either and I cringe with admiration when remembering the afternoon he suggested, for the first time, that we play catch. I was 15 and he was sixty-something. He couldn't throw worth a damn, or catch that well, and before I was able to do much damage to his person he admitted as much and then disappeared to the other side of the patio gate. I can imagine he went inside and told my mother of his failure. He was a father of six and a veteran of two wars and a journalist and a political consultant for people both crooked and honest, but he couldn't throw or catch a ball. Some people realize it much sooner but I lived a pretty sheltered life I guess and it was the first time I came to see that grownups were fallible. After that of course it was pretty much an open flood gate and as a wizened 15-year-old I arrived at the conclusion that all grownups, to put it mildly, were fallible.
There he is though, back in 1969 or 70, walking up the floating sidewalk to the Fishorama, alongside that little freckled wisp of boy whose brown head glowed red in the afternoon sun. People were always mistaking him for the boy's grandfather. He got a kick out of that is the way he put it. It was one of the things he could pull off convincingly, which is as good as it gets sometimes, regarding this definition of who a man is. I am not a fisherman, I am not a ballplayer, I am this boy's grandfather.
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