Themes: Talented Animals, Talking Animals, Race Against Time
Main Cast: Pat Englund, George C. Scott, Trish VanDevere, Paul Sorvino, Fritz Weaver, Jon Korkes
Release Year: 1973
Country: US
Run Time: 104 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Plot
Director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry team up again (after collaborating on The Graduate and Catch-22) for this adaptation of Robert Merle's best-selling adventure novel concerning dolphins who become pawns in a plot to kill the president. George C. Scott plays Dr. Jake Terrell, a researcher who, along with his wife Maggie (Trish Van Devere), is investigating dolphin intelligence, believing they have the capability of speech. Harold DeMilo (Fritz Weaver), in charge of a major corporation, sponsors their work. But undercover work by government agent Curtis Mahoney (Paul Sorvino) reveals that DeMilo is working with a right-wing group planning to kidnap the dolphins and use them to blow up the presidential yacht. Jake and Maggie have to race against time to save both their dolphins and the president. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
A brilliant and driven scientist, Jake Terrell, and his young and beautiful wife, Maggie, train dolphins to communicate with humans. This is done by teaching the dolphins to literally speak English in dolphin-like voices. Two of his dolphins, Alpha ("Fa") and Beta ("Bea") are stolen by officials of the shadowy Franklin Foundation headed by Harold DeMilo (Fritz Weaver) the supportive backer of the Terrells' research. After the dolphins are kidnapped, an investigation by an undercover government agent for hire, Curtis Mahoney (Paul Sorvino) reveals that the Institute is planning to further train the dolphins to carry out a political assassination using a limpet mine against the yacht of the President of the United States.
The film received mixed reviews when released in 1973 -- Pauline Kael, the film critic for The New Yorker suggested that if the best subject that Nichols and Henry could think of was talking dolphins, then they should quit making movies altogether—and was not successful commercially, though it was nominated for two Academy Awards, for Best Original Score (Georges Delerue) and Best Sound (Richard Portman and Larry Jost). The film has gone on to a minor cult status as manifested by its never having gone out of print.
The film was originally going to be directed by Roman Polanski; however, while Polanski was in London, England, looking for filming locations in August 1969, his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was murdered in their Beverly Hills home. Polanski returned to the United States, and abandoned the project.
Differences from the novel and other sources of inspiration
Merle's novel, a satire of the Cold War, is supposedly the basis for this film, but apparently the film's plot was substantially different from that of the novel. The movie is rather inspired in part from the scientist John Lilly's life. John C. Lilly was a physician, biophysicist, neuroscientist, and inventor who specialized in the study of consciousness. In 1959, Lilly founded the Communications Research Institute at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands and served as its director until 1968. There he worked with dolphins exploring dolphin intelligence and human-dolphin communication.
Cultural References
On June 25, 2007, Stephen Colbert recommended his viewers rent this film after making an allusion to it that received little reaction from the studio audience.
A reference to the film appears in the episode "Six Feet Under the Sea" on the television show Psych.
See also
Military dolphin, as to contemporary military uses of trained dolphins.
