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Moby Dick

A handsome New Bedford whaler wins the minister’s daughter, loses a leg to a white whale, and decides the only cure is to kill the beast or die trying. Lloyd Bacon’s 1930 Warner Bros. talkie is not Melville’s novel so much as a pre-Code vehicle for John Barrymore, remaking his own 1926 silent The Sea Beast: Ahab starts as a romantic scamp, Joan Bennett is Faith Mapple, and a jealous brother poisons the homecoming. Barrymore, still a matinee idol and already a legend, plays both the lover and the monomaniac; when he finally stands on the whale’s back the movie gives him a Hollywood ending Melville never wrote. Bacon, a Warner workhorse of early sound, keeps the ships, storms, and harpoons moving. Loose, lusty, and unfaithful — Barrymore’s Ahab, not the book’s.

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