The most remarkable unravelling of a abstract story

It's hard to realize how difficult it must be to convert a text as poetic as Moby Dick to pure storytelling. When you read the original text the story is actually buried in an exposition of whaling, shipping, and virtually the entire subject of sea voyaging . A very small portion of the text is committed to the story itself. In this particular case it's just plain amazing how Huston put the story together, eliminating unnecessary characters and incidents and fabricating a cohesive whole that follows Melville's tale correctly and beautifully without creating any script that has no reference to the original novel. Besides that, the interactive high quality of performances congealed so artistically the movie stands out as unique in its character and ambiance.
But again, to maintain and embellish the original story of a literary classic without much alteration is a quality devoutly to be wished. In this case, both Gregory Peck's performance and the overall structural beauty of the movie make this work incomparable and one of the truly great motion pictures of all time.