This well meaning but ultimately unsatisfying adaptation of Robert Merle’s 1967 novel Un animal doué de raison was originally meant to have been directed by Roman Polanski. But while he was in London scouting locations, Charles Manson’s followers murdered his wife Sharon Tate and a distraught Polanski abandoned the project. It passed through the hands of Franklin Schaffner the following year before it fell to director Mike Nichols, who had previously made The Graduate (1967), Catch-22 (1970) and Carnal Knowledge (1971), and his regular screenwriter Buck Henry to bring the book to the screen.
Marine biologist Jake Terrell (George C. Scott), his wife Maggie (Trish Van Devere) and their team of young assistants are researching ways to communicate with dolphins on their remote island laboratory, financed by the Franklin Foundation headed by Harold DeMilo (Fritz Weaver). The team has enjoyed some success with the dolphin Alpha, nicknamed Fa, born in captivity and taught to speak a few English words. As he reaches maturity, Fa is joined by a captured wild dolphin, Beta (“Bea”) who Fa teaches to speak. But the scientists’ research is derailed when the dolphins are abducted by a shadowy right wing cabal who have been using the Franklin Foundation as a front and who are planning to kill the president of the United States by having the dolphins attach limpet mines to the presidential yacht. Aided by an undercover agent, Curtis Mahoney (Paul Sorvino), who has infiltrated the laboratory, the race is on to find the Fa and Bea before they can carry out the assassination attempt.
How much you enjoy The Day of the Dolphin will depend on how much of its silliness you’re willing to put up with. The talking dolphins – who speak with the voice of a very young child, voiced by an uncredited Robert Lydiard, all the better to tug the heartstrings in the downbeat finale – are one thing and demand quite the leap of faith from the audience. But the addition of a typically 70s conspiracy plot is quite another. The first half of the film just about works, thanks in no small part to some stunning photography, courtesy of William A. Fraker, of the dolphins and by Scott’s ability to sell the absurdity of the situation by playing his role with his usual deadly serious intensity. The whole venture could so easily have toppled over into high camp but Nichols and Henry – unlikely choices for the gig given their background in comedy – play it completely straight. Perhaps too straight as a lighter touch might have still kept the camp at bay but allowed for some recognition of how daft the whole thing really is.
The film unravels in the latter stages as the right wing conspiracy reveals itself and all sorts of questions start to rear their ugly heads. Why do the conspiracy need these two dolphins in particular? Dolphins are remarkably intelligent creatures and even the most dim-witted example could easily have been trained to carry out the job – the U.S Navy had been training dolphins in mine hunting and object recovery for some time, though the film-makers may not have been aware of this as the program wasn’t officially declassified until the early 1990s. Surely just catching a wild dolphin and training it from scratch, though time consuming, would have attracted a lot less attention than stealing two dolphins (which can talk, lets not forget) from a science lab. And why use dolphins at all? If history has taught us anything it’s that a lone gunman can carry out political assassinations perfectly well if the circumstances are right.
The assassination plot, which feels tacked on to the main story, is carefully concealed by Henry until the moment is right for the reveal, but his work as rather undone by the film’s notoriously spoilerific poster campaign which originally came complete with the strapline “Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the president of the United States” which must have had Henry and Nichols throwing up their hands in despair. The campaign was later changed to the more ambiguous “Dolphins trained as man’s ultimate weapon!” but by then the cat was out of the bag and the film’s big surprise was ruined even before patrons bought their tickets.
The plot deviates significantly from the novel, taking inspiration as much from the work of scientist John C. Lilly as from Merle. Lilly, a neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, philosopher and leading light of the American late-60s counterculture dabbled in the use of isolation tanks (his work also informed Paddy Chaveksy’s novel and Ken Russell’s subsequent film adaptation Altered States (1980)), took an interest in the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, made significant contributions to the study of electrical stimulation of the nervous system and dabbled in psychedelics as part of his ongoing exploration of the outer limits of human consciousness. He also did a considerable amount of work in the 1960s researching ways to communicate with dolphins, work that contributed much to the understanding of the animals’ brain structure and behavioural patterns. He returned to the subject in the 1980s, developing a computer-generated language that he hoped to teach to the dolphins as a way of creating a common language.
The scenes between Terrell and the dolphins are, at times genuinely touching (though his decision to forcibly separate the couple to force Fa to start speaking again after the animal understandably loses interest in humans once he’s introduced to a potential mate is cruel and out of character) and the film might have benefited from more of this more thoughtful science fiction and less of the predictable conspiracy thriller that the film devolves into. Today the shots of Terrell riding around underwater on Fa’s back and the very concept of caging dolphins for scientific research leaves a bad taste but the scenes with Fa and Bea (played by performing dolphins Buck and Ginger respectively) and by far the most compelling.
The film’s biggest flaw is that Nichols simply wasn’t the right director for the job. He often feels disengaged from the film, struggling to overcome its inherit absurdity, It needed a director who could have made a virtue out of the frankly ludicrous premise but Nichols seems uneasy with the film’s more interesting aspect – inter-species communication – and not terribly interested in the conspiracy business. Audiences seemed to agree and the film was a box office disappointment. Word of mouth about the inherent absurdity of the plot and the bummer of an ending wouldn’t have done the film’s prospects much good. Catch-22, though now regarded as a triumph, had also performed poorly and the subsequent failure of The Fortune (1975) – a film Nichols still refuses to discuss – temporarily put the brakes on Nichols’ career. Other than the documentary Gilda Live (1980) he was out of action from 1975 until the success of his comeback film Silkwood (1983) restored his reputation. He returned to EOFFTV territory in 1994 when he cast Jack Nicholson as a lycanthrope in Wolf.
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