VIEWS OF THE INVISIBLE

...Welles strikes the pitch of magnificence for the film to follow...

...The enemy of true knowledge is man's own illusion of freedom...

...In sixty years of film, the technical difficulties of cinematically representing life on the sea and the pursuit of the whale have been essayed many times—in versions of Melville's novel and other films about whaling, many actually free adaptions of the story of the book...

...He is someone only accidentally enraged, not eternally grappling with the beast still strident on the edge of man...

...The Wilson drawings are not literal representations of scenes from the novel, but figurative illustrations out of a sensitive, personal insight...

...And, like Moby Dick, it represents the kind of film making, esteeming both the material and the audience, which, whether it succeeds or not, must bring the kind of stature to the screen that is not measurable in area...

...The events seem to occur, nevertheless, because of what people think, say, or do...

...Admitting our free will, we are led to absurdity...

...The complexity of the character of Prince Andrey, who has been called "the only truly intelligent Tolstoyan hero," is radically extracted in the script...

...In simple, there is more to see, and see again, and relish and remember in this imperfect coliseum of film than we may find in a myriad more flawless masterpieces of lesser intentions and lesser fulfillment...

...Views of the Invisible by MARTIN S. DWORKIN TOURING the filming of Moby Dick, director John Huston is said to have handed writer Ray Bradbury a fake telegram signed by Jack Warner insisting that the script needed "love interest," and that girls had to be written in somewhere in the search for the fabulous White Whale...

...But Huston's striving for lyricism throughout the film bespeaks a sense of the novel as something more than the primitive anticipation of Freudian revelation some clinical critics have made it out to be...

...As for splendor, there are several sequences which take their place among the most visually impressive in film history...

...The story is probably true...

...But in the part of Ahab he rattles around like bird-shot in a cannon...

...Peck does not sustain it—even as Moby Dick fails to rise above its simplified narrative of the foredoomed voyage of certain men after a whale...

...The sheer information in each scene of the film is astonishing...

...For, almost at the opening of the film, we are given a completely forceful delineation of the grand manner in which the part of Ahab must be acted, as Orson Welles delivers Father Mapple's sermon...

...In the interview with Starbuck, played by Leo Genn, Peck is so matter-of-fact in counterposing his vengeful purpose to the mate's pleas for a sensible, religiously ordered attention to the work of whaling, that it is Starbuck's conviction of Ahab's blasphemy that seems incongruous...

...For Huston's Moby Dick, while containing many superlative sequences and much throughout that is fascinating, nevertheless suffers from many inadequacies which vitally affect our experience of the work...

...It is true of Huston as it is of very few creators of film, that his touch upon a scene is directed towards exciting and releasing the imagination...

...Modern history is like a deaf man answering questions which no one has asked him...

...And yet, the Dino De Laurentiis production, made in Italy with actors and technicians from many nations, under King Vidor's direction, achieves a kind of success in its own right, as if taking on a parallel identity quite distinct from the novel...

...The integrity of his effort to recreate the novel far surpasses the simple intention of avoiding the traditional movie emendations and mutilations, such as shipping an ingenue as romantic supercargo on the Pequod...

...Some may be traced to the theory of interpretation by which Huston and Bradbury adapted their screenplay from the novel...

...It is interesting to note the striking effectiveness of a much more modest filming of Moby Dick released a year ago...

...For Tolstoy, General Kutuzov was the instinctive instrument of inevitable forces...

...If it were only possible to praise the work as highly as the heart in which it was undertaken...

...In the last sequences, as the "be-charmed crew" waits in the boats for the sounding Moby Dick to rise, Peck's Ahab cannot dominate the scene...

...As such, they graphically complement Melville's volcanic language, suggesting imagery to inspire the imagination, without superimposing a special vision of the concrete...

...like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them...

...For him, the causes and effects adduced by historians to explain or evaluate events are illusions...

...For all the gigantism of film spectacles, since the earliest days of the movies, War And Peace has been made just this once...

...Bradbury was taken in, reacting with a violence Huston relished, until the hoax had to be exposed...

...Within the compressed conception of Pierre, the idealist, Henry Fonda is convincing—except physically, as he lacks Pierre's bearish massivity...

...His filming of Moby Dick, that most invisible and imaginatively excruciating of novels, therefore has a certain propriety to begin with...

...Comparison with the full-length Huston film need not denigrate either, but is remarkably suggestive of the boundaries of sense and imagination in treating the novel on the screen...

...But this line is able to carry an enormous wealth of details of life and manners in early Eighteenth Century Russia...

...The story has been reduced to the experience of certain people through peace and war—with the discovery of war's horror and disillusion as the theme...

...In the film, he articulates deliberate intentions—a "genius" in just the sense Tolstoy deprecated and denied...

...The medium that has presented innumerable Biblical spectacles, epics of all eras of the past—including the prehistoric, and versions of such enormous works of fiction as Ben Hur, Quo Vadisf, Anthony Adverse, and Gone With The Wind, seems to have hesitated before the 559 characters of War And Peace, its panorama of an entire society in a time of revolutionary ferment and invasion, its enormous canvases of battles, marches, and retreats...

...It perhaps signifies a seeking for cultural community as well as for superb new material for the bigger screen systems, but a race between three or four companies developed quite suddenly when the possibility came to be accepted...

...Writing in 1950, the late James Agee called Huston "one of the few movie artists who without thinking twice about it, honors his audience...

...War and Peace raises barriers of over-whelming quantity...

...Gregory Peck's characterization is a clinical case-study...

...The Russians themselves never made it even in the period of their great directors: Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovz-henko—although perhaps as much for doctrinal reasons as for any of difficulty...

...the role of great men, and of either deliberate planning or factors of chance are insignificant...

...The scene in which he falls to his knees to give thanks to God that the French have quit Moscow, and that Russia is saved, is one of the most moving in the film...

...The film's simplification of the narrative has greater consistency than its representation of the historical context...

...This approach may accord well with psychoanalytic reductions of Melville's meanings...

...But what they have achieved is at best a kind of palatable distillation in filmic terms—of a work whose innumerable essences are sublime, in Longinus' sense of "a consummate excellence and distinction of language," and profoundly ambiguous, as in Jean Cocteau's ideal for a creative work...

...to be famous, unknown, and undiscovered...

...Audrey Hepburn is generally delightful as the warm-hearted but empty-headed Natasha...

...Much of film making is a kind of previewing, whereby the audience is led to see only what it is shown, and is shown only the obvious...

...Herbert Lom is a fine Tolstoyan caricature of Napoleon, and Oscar Homolka is a superbly patient, stolidly heroic, un-Tolstoyan Kutuzov...

...In the film, Tolstoy's cynicism about great men and their designs, generals and their plans, comes across as a mere debunking of certain people: Napoleon on one side, the Russian advocates of traditional attack and position warfare on the other...

...But there is more to be revealed than in Mel Ferrer's remote and inflexible portrayal...

...The weakness of Peck's Ahab pervades the film, almost coercing Huston's frequently ineffectual devices to enframe the invisible...

...Tension and foreboding must be attempted again by repeated close-ups of the oarsmen, mates, and harpooners, alternating with what soon become interminable views of seagulls whirling and screaming overhead...

...Its sublimity lies in the breadth of its overview of persons and events, and its profundity in its penetration of their relationships...

...The essential style, character, nuance of a work of art evades the senses which are uninspired...

...They have avoided the obvious, theatrical simplifications and devices so sadly characteristic of movie transformations of literary classics...

...The hesitation was surely justified...

...admitting our dependence on the external world, time, and cause, we are led to laws"—and these have their origin and ultimate reasons in the will of God...

...Agee was impressed by Huston's devotion to engrossing the audience as individual participants in the film experience, rather than passive spectators of entertainment...

...Produced and directed by Jerry Winters, this shorter, more concentrated version utilizes a series of wash drawings by Gilbert Wilson, and portions of Melville's text read by Thomas Mitchell...

...The interpretation, too, has determined the many failures of Huston's own high purposes, as his effort to pictorialize the ineffable spirit of the book often becomes literal rather than evocative, hiding the invisible that is accessible to the imagination behind images too concrete and visually specific...

...Pecks style of acting expresses his range, which is large enough to extend to excellent portrayals in such varied films as The Gunfighter, Man With A Million, and The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit...

...If the cold mistiness of the duel between Pierre and Dolokhov in the snow is a triumph of color and framing on a fixed set, the sequence of Borodino, with its unforgettable opening of Pierre's stumbling upon the immensity of the field, and its panoramas of charges, countercharges, marches, volleys, and headlong routs extending for miles towards the horizon, is surely one of the most spectacular episodes of battle ever filmed...

...Peck has none of the grandeur of the primordially accursed, demoniac Ahab, who stood...

...There are imbalances in the acting of the international cast, with several styles in occasional conflict...

...For one thing, it is quite in character for Huston, as he presents himself to the world of gossip columnists and magazine raconteurs...

...To put it all on film is impossible...

...The film develops a validity of its own, despite the inevitable selection and foreshortening of persons, themes, and emphasis— and the far more crucial, paradoxical fact that its comprehensive outlook upon the events depicted and the characters involved almost ignores Tolstoy's fundamental philosophy...

...As material for film, Moby Dick presents problems of recreating qualities of arcane complexity and subtlety...

...Jack Cardiff's photography, and Ado Tonti's in the second unit, are virtuoso utilizations of the VistaVision format...

...God's will, and God's will alone, moves all things and creatures...

...It suggests wonder as to the effects the film may have on the Russians, if and when they are enabled to see it, and as to whether audiences everywhere may not gain a sense of feelings quite out of keeping with the presumptions of the cold war, on both sides...

...At least, it ought to be...

...Tolstoy's novel is neither sublime in the sense of "a consummate excellence and distinction of language," nor profound in the sense of poetic or philosophic ambiguity...

...His Ahab is an apparent schizophrenic, displaying catatonic symptoms of reciprocating states of stupor and frenzy...

...Tolstoy wrote War And Peace as a work of anti-history—or, rather, anti-historiography...

...For another, it says a great deal for the integrity of his attempt to film the Melville novel, whether it succeeds or fails...

...Vision is merely the beginning of perception, and in film, as in all the arts, to perceive is to perfect the paradox of seeing the invisible...

...But the chief failure of the film,' in which all the others seem to converge, is in the interpretation of Ahab...

...After all, the two previous movie versions, with John Barrymore, did have a woman on the Pequod, subordinating Ahab's epic contention with the whale somewhat...

...In all, the achievement of War And Peace is its validity as an affecting, provocative film experience, transcending the numerous criticisms, qualifications and doubts which must be asserted...

...The invisibility of War And Peace is of quite another order from that of Moby Dick...

...In the crucial dedication scene, wherein Ahab animates the crew to follow him after the one White Whale, Peck's exhortation is so colorless that Huston must try to build a sense of hypnotized affirmation out of pointless, repeated close-ups of the admittedly photogenic faces of the listening actors...

...The size and temper of Peck's performance is out of place, even in the Huston-Bradbury conception...

...War And Peace is one of the most extraordinary novels ever written, the archetype and touchstone for historical fiction...

...These are manifested within a massive paranoia that is fixated in a mission of vengeance against a whale personifying his conception of evil...