[In Moby Dick John Huston] has been unable to make the book his own cinematically, and the final gesture the film makes is simply that Melville once wrote a "Great Book"….

As with [The Red Badge of Courage], Huston has seized on the heightened pressure of the book. But he has failed to comprehend the balance, the interior stresses by which it was produced. The spectacle he can certainly provide—the painted Queequeg, the weird Coleridgean calm, the whalebone leg of Ahab—but, because he has been unable to realise the context, the ordinary weary grind of life on the Pequod, the careful expertise of the whale hunts, these become just so many theatrical effects. Wherever the film touches on the pure routine (the melting down of the whale, for instance) it is, significantly, at its most perfunctory. The hunts themselves become in Huston's handling a wild, artificial...