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THE DAY OF THE DOLPHIN
Rating: 
USA. 1973.
Director – Mike Nichols, Screenplay – Buck Henry, Based on the Novel by Robert Merle, Producer – Robert E. Relyea, Photography – William A. Fraker, Music – Georges Delerue, Photographic Effects – Albert Whitlock, Special Effects – Jim White, Production Design – Richard Sylbert. Production Company – Icarus Productions/Avco Embassy.
Cast:
George C. Scott (Jake Terrell), Trish van der Vere (Maggie Anderson Terrell), Paul Sorvino (Curtis Mahoney), Fritz Weaver (Harold De Milo), Jon Korkes (David/William C. Conklin), John Dehner (Wallingford)
Plot: At his research institute in the Florida Keys, Dr Jake Terrell has spent four years teaching the dolphin Alpha to speak English. But while Terrell is away on the mainland, the Franklin Foundation that bankrolls his research comes, removing Alpha and its mate. Terrell discovers the Foundation is really a covert government agency who intend to use the dolphins to plant limpet mines on the undersides of boats and are now planning to use them to assassinate The President.
The Day of the Dolphin comes with all the earnestness of a film determined to make a statement big, loud and with all the deadening self-importance of the films beloved of the Oscar awards. The film was made by director Mike Nichols, who had just come from making no less than the likes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967) and Catch 22 (1970), and it has a script from writer-comedian Buck Henry (who had written the scripts for most of Nichols abovementioned films), who adapts a 1967 work by French sf/historical novelist Robert Merle.
The film is slow-moving, even occasionally impressive. The dolphin scenes are wonderful, with beautiful graceful images of them frolicking, swimming with humans and some quite amazing footage of a dolphin giving birth. But the film essentially hinges on whether or not one is prepared to sufficiently suspend disbelief to accept that a dolphin can talk, squawking as they do like inarticulate Smurfs. This reviewer couldn’t. There is one scene with Fa racing around the pool, battering against the dividing plate, finally saying “Fa want Bee now,” which has an eventually triumphant power in a slow, almost-Kubrickian way. But such evocations of the dolphin’s intelligence are few. It is a problem not exactly helped by the story’s hurried tossing away of developing the dolphin’s intelligence for a suspense plot, leaving the film as little more than Flipper with raised consciousness.
Director Mike Nichols later returned to the genre with the interesting werewolf film Wolf (1994), the really unfunny alien visitor comedy What Planet Are You From? (2000) and the absolutely stunning AIDS and angels mini-series Angels in America (2003).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1991
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