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 speak English in dolphin-like voices. Two of his dolphins, Alpha and Beta, are stolen by officials of the shadowy Franklin Foundation headed by Harold DeMilo, the supportive backer of the Terrells' research. After the dolphins are kidnapped, an investigation by an undercover government agent for hire, Curtis Mahoney, reveals that the Institute is planning to further train the dolphins to carry out a political assassination by having them place a magnetic limpet mine on the hull of the yacht of the President of the United States.
The novel was translated into English by Helen Weaver and published in the US in 1969 under the title The Day of the Dolphin. The film version was originally going to be directed by Roman Polanski for United Artists in 1969, with Polanski writing the script. However, while Polanski was in London, England, looking for filming locations in August 1969, his pregnant wife, the actressSharon Tate, was murdered in their Beverly Hills home by disciples of Charles Manson. Polanski returned to the United States and abandoned the project. The following year it was announced Franklin Schaffner would make the movie for the Mirisch Corporation. These plans were frustrated and Joseph Levine ended up buying the project from United Artists for Mike Nichols. Scott was paid $750,000 for his role. The film was mostly shot on Abaco Island in The Bahamas. Production was extremely difficult. Scott allegedly held up production for three days at the start of the shoot. Nichols later described it as the toughest shoot he had done to date.
Reception
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. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune penned a positive review commenting that, "Ultimately, The Day of the Dolphin works because of the values it celebrates and Scott communicates. The values are communication and love. In spite of their material, Nichols and Scott have given us a film that reminds us what love and care can do not so much for the object of affection, but for the person who tenders it. On that level, The Day of the Dolphin is really a fable." The film was not successful commercially, though it was nominated for two Academy Awards, for Best Original Score and Best Sound. Levine also claimed the movie had guaranteed pre-sales of $8,450,000 to cover costs, including a sale to NBC, which had expressed interest into turning the story into a TV series. Alpha the dolphin was named best animal actor in the 24th Patsy Awards. Levine admitted the film was not a success:
The rushes looked great. But it just didn't jell somehow. I really think Mike was the wrong guy to direct. And George C. Scott!... He got paid $750,000 for that movie—and ran us over schedule. The first three days of shooting he reported in with a "virus".
As of July 2020, The Day of the Dolphin holds a rating of 42% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 26 reviews.
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 the film's plot was substantially different from that of the novel. The movie is instead inspired in part from the scientist John C. Lilly's life. A physician, biophysicist, neuroscientist, and inventor, Lilly specialized in the study of consciousness. In 1959, he 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. See also Bottlenose dolphin communication and John Lilly and cetacean communication.
