Movie Moments: #23

Moby Dick (1956)

Movie Quote:

 

Starbuck: To be enraged with a dumb brute that acted out of blind instinct is blasphemous.

Captain Ahab: Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. Look ye, Starbuck, all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of their features. The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung.

(Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab; Leo Genn as First Mate Starbuck)

Trivia:

The Starbuck's Coffee franchise took its name from the character Starbuck of the Pequod crew.

Gregory Peck (Captain Ahab) and director John Huston intended to shoot Herman Melville's Typee in 1957, but the funding fell through. Not long after, the two had a falling out after Peck discovered that Huston had been forced to cast Peck as Ahab by the Mirisch brothers at Warner's to secure financing. Peck felt Huston had deceived him into taking a part for which Peck felt he was ill-suited and, by his own admission, too young and with not enough in him for the part. Years later Peck tried to patch up his differences with the Huston rebuffed the attempt. Huston, quoted in Lawrence Grobel's biography The Hustons, said that it was too late to start over. The two never spoke to each other again