Yesterday I received and watched Twilight Time‘s Bluray of John Huston‘s Moby Dick (’56). It delivers an excellent simulation of the appearance of the original release prints — not desaturated but the result of three-strip color prints blended with a black-and-white negative. To my eyes the 1080p image delivers the most striking, well-finessed attempt to imitate what the film looked like to first-run audiences a half-century ago.
The Bluray doesn’t provide an actual recreation of the color process created by Huston and dp Oswald Morris, but it makes Moby Dick look as good as it’s ever going to look in this regard. Call it largely satisfying, and that ain’t hay.
Moby Dick‘s color process was restored by Greg Kimble over an eight-month period. The Bluray contains a nice supplemental essay, A Bleached Whale: Recreating the Unique Color of Moby Dick.
Here’s a portion of a 12.3.15 piece that I ran about Kino DVD version:
“It’s a good time to reconsider the fascinating color scheme — subdued grayish sepia tones mixed with a steely black-and-white flavoring — created by Huston and Morris. This special process wasn’t created in the negative but in the release prints, and only those who caught the original run of the film in theatres saw the precise intended look.
“There have been attempts to simulate this appearance, but the Real McCoy visuals were a different, more distinct animal. I saw about three or four minutes worth of an original Moby Dick release print at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn theatre sometime in the early to mid ’90s, and I’m telling you there was something spooky about them. I was riveted by how striking and other-worldly the color looked — something that wasn’t really ‘color’ as much a mood painting that came from someone’s (or some lab’s) drizzly damp November soul.
“I’d love to visually convey to HE readers what the 1956 release prints of Moby Dick really looked like — that wonderful silvery overlay, distinctive but muted and mixed with grayish color. But with luscious black levels.