It stars Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, Richard Basehart as Ishmael, and Leo Genn as Starbuck, with supporting performances by James Robertson Justice, Harry Andrews, Bernard Miles, Noel Purcell and Orson Welles as Father Mapple.

In the inn where he is staying for the night, he is forced to share his room with a Pacific Islander and harponeer named Queequeg, whom he befriends after a tense first meeting.

Just before their departure, Ishmael and Queequeg encounter a man named Elijah, who delivers an ominous warning about Ahab and that all but one of the crew who follow him will find their deaths on this voyage.

As the ship casts off, and for some time afterwards, Ahab remains unseen until he finally appears to align his crew to the hunt for Moby Dick and sets course for the Bikini Atoll, where the whale is said to dwell.

While the crew reaps a fair bounty of oil on their journey, Ahab's obsession with Moby Dick remains foremost in his mind.

Casting bones to read his future, Queequeg foresees his death and orders the ship's carpenter to make him a coffin, before he sits down to await his demise.

They encounter the Rachel, another whaler from New Bedford, whose captain, Gardiner, asks Ahab to help search for his son, who was carried off by Moby Dick.

Under the agreement, WB would distribute Moby Dick for seven years, after which all rights would revert to the Mirisch brothers' company, Moulin Productions.

According to one biography, Peck discovered to his disappointment that he had not been Huston's choice for Ahab, but in fact was thrust upon the director by the Mirisch brothers to secure financing.

[10][11] Orson Welles later used the salary from his appearance to fund his own stage production of Moby Dick, in which Rod Steiger played Captain Ahab.

Reportedly in search of "a port that hadn't changed in a hundred years", Huston chose the town from a shortlist that included Wicklow, Arklow, and Kinsale.

Production required local craftsmen to dredge the harbor by hand, erect facades over coastal buildings to resemble 1800s New Bedford, and dress telephone poles with canvas to appear as ships' masts.

[12] Nearly twenty-thousand people descended on Youghal to watch filming during the summer of 1954, with female extras playing the crew's wives and daughters who wave to the departing ship.

[22] A myth that was put to rest in cinematographer Oswald Morris' autobiography, Huston, We Have a Problem, is that no full-length whale models were ever built for the production.

[23] Moby Dick was 75 ft long and weighed 12 tons, and required 80 drums of compressed air and a hydraulic system in order to remain afloat and operational.

Ninety percent of the shots of the white whale are various size miniatures filmed in a water tank in Shepperton Studios in Surrey, near London.

Whales and longboat models were built by a special effects man, August Lohman, working in conjunction with art director Stephen Grimes.

[28] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called Moby Dick "a rolling and thundering color film that is herewith devoutly recommended as one of the great motion pictures of our times ... Space does not possibly permit us to cite all the things about this film that are brilliantly done or developed, from the strange, subdued color scheme employed to the uncommon faithfulness to details of whaling that are observed.

"[30] Variety wrote: "Essentially it is a 'chase' picture with all the inherent interest thereby implied and yet not escaping the quality of sameness and repetition which often dulls the chase formula."

"[33] Harrison's Reports praised the "excellence of the production values" but noted, "It is not until the last few reels, where a violent battle to the death takes place between the whale and the crew, that the action becomes highly exciting.

This fierce combat with the whale has been staged in thrilling fashion and is the highlight of the film, but it is not enough to compensate for the lack of excitement in the preceding reels.

"[34] John McCarten of The New Yorker called Moby Dick "a fine, big, elementary job that misses the mystical Melville by several nautical miles but affords us an almost completely satisfactory tour of the bounding main.

"[36] TimeOut said: "[T]he great white whale is significantly less impressive when lifting bodily out of the sea to crush the Pequod than when first glimpsed one moonlit night ... a pitifully weak Starbuck.

Lent a stout overall unity by ... the intelligent adaptation (and) by color grading which gives the images the tonal quality of old whaling prints..it is often staggeringly good.

"[37] The film has an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus that "It may favor spectacle in place of the deeper themes in Herman Melville's novel, but John Huston's Moby Dick still makes for a grand movie adventure.