Editor’s Note: Are some movies like fine wine — they truly are well? Freeline Media critic Milan Paurich takes a fresh look at a 1973 thriller by director Mike Nichols that flopped in its day. And today? Read on!

By Milan Paurich

Some films are ahead of their time. Others seem to have been waiting for a different theatrical environment to arrive.

Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin belongs to the latter category. Released in December 1973, it was an expensive, beautifully photographed, unmistakably adult science-fiction movie about intelligent dolphins, scientific exploitation, military conspiracies and the possibility that another species might actually be capable of communicating with us. Based on Robert Merle’s 1967 novel, it was exactly the sort of strange, ambitious American project that the New Hollywood era had made possible. And yet it landed with a thud.

That failure is usually treated as evidence that the film simply didn’t work. Yes, it’s awkwardly constructed, tonally uncertain and intermittently preposterous. Nichols never quite decides whether he’s making a paranoid thriller, a family drama, a sci-fi adventure or an ecological warning. Buck Henry’s screenplay strains to make its conspiracy intelligible while simultaneously asking us to accept the extraordinary proposition that dolphins can learn rudimentary English. The result is a movie that can seem simultaneously too solemn and too silly.

But there’s another way of looking at it.

The Day of the Dolphin may have been not merely ahead of its time, but caught at the wrong moment in time. The most tantalizing evidence is buried in its own history.

United Artists purchased Merle’s novel in 1969 and hired Roman Polanski to write and direct. He was actively prepping the picture and scouting locations when, in August of that year, his wife Sharon Tate and their unborn child were murdered by members of the Manson Family. Polanski eventually abandoned the project, and director Franklin J. Schaffner became attached to the project. The film went through another round of development hell before producer Joseph E. Levine and Avco Embassy eventually handed it to Nichols.

The Polanski version exists only in the imagination which is why it’s so intriguing. Imagine a Day of the Dolphin made by the auteur behind Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby. The material suddenly possess an entirely different molecular structure. Polanski was fascinated by apparently ordinary environments that gradually reveal themselves to be hostile institutions whose benign surfaces concealed malign intentions and protagonists who discovered that their private worlds had been invaded by forces they could neither comprehend nor control. That’s Dolphin in a nutshell.

Dr. Jake Terrell (George C. Scott) thinks he’s conducting an enlightened experiment in animal intelligence. His dolphins aren’t laboratory curiosities but collaborators. Fa, in particular, has crossed the threshold between animal and something approaching personhood. He can understand language, respond and express affection, fear and curiosity. Jake and his wife, Maggie (Trish Van Devere, Scott’s real-life spouse) have created something quite beautiful. Then the outside world intervenes.

The people financing the research turn out to have an ulterior agenda. The dolphins aren’t merely to be studied; they’re to be exploited. And the nightmarish premise is that the very intelligence Jake has nurtured can be turned against humans. Nichols and  Henry play this almost entirely as a cerebral political thriller; a Polanski version might have made it feel like a horror movie.

That isn’t to say that Polanski would have necessarily made a better film; it’s to recognize that The Day of the Dolphin contained possibilities Nichols only partially realized. And Nichols is, in some ways, the most fascinating choice to direct precisely because he was so temperamentally unsuited to the material.

The man who gave us Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge was one of the great anatomists of American behavior. Nichols understood vanity, sexual anxiety, intellectual pretension and the ways people lie to themselves. He understood the comedy lurking beneath catastrophe, and the catastrophe lurking beneath the comedy.

But Dolphin needed something more elemental. It needed to make us believe in the dolphins before it asked us to worry about what men might do to them.

And Nichols came remarkably close to realizing that goal. The sequences with Fa are the film’s heart. Scott, playing Jake as a rumpled, obsessive scientist, has the rare ability to make intellectual excitement look like physical excitement. His Jake isn’t simply fascinated by the dolphins, he’s emotionally dependent on them. They’ve become his family, his life’s work and perhaps his proof that human beings are capable of creating a relationship based on communication rather than domination. 

This is where the movie becomes genuinely touching. Fa isn’t merely a clever cinematic animal; he represents the possibility that intelligence doesn’t have to belong exclusively to us. That idea now seems almost commonplace, but at the time it felt wonderfully strange. 

And here we come to the film’s second great historical problem. 

The Day of the Dolphin was released four years before Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars.

In 1973, American audiences had certainly seen their share of science fiction movies, but Hollywood hadn’t yet fully rediscovered the commercial power of wonder. The classic sci-fi of the late ’60s and early ’70s — 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, Soylent Green — leaned toward pessimism or dystopia. They asked filmgoers to contemplate the future with skepticism. Dolphin belongs to that tradition, but it also contains the seeds of something else: the belief that encountering another form of intelligence might be emotionally transcendent.

Four years later, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas would turn that possibility into reality. 

If Dolphin has arrived after those massive hits, its dolphins wouldn’t necessarily have seemed like such a kooky dramatic hook but its marketing raison d’être. 

Think about what Nichols’ movie does offer: beautiful Caribbean locations, magnificent animals, scientific experimentation, secret government activity, military technology, a potentially apocalyptic threat and an Oscar-winning lead actor. There’s even an adventure flick buried inside. 

In the wake of Close Encounters and Star Wars, Hollywood might have known how to sell it. That doesn’t mean it would have automatically become a hit. But it’s hard  to imagine that audiences newly receptive to intelligent extraterrestrial life, benevolent nonhuman creatures and large-scale sci-fi spectacle wouldn’t have been more willing to meet Nichols’ dolphins halfway.

Its timing was almost comically unpropitious. 

The film cost roughly $8 million and opened in December ’73 when the marketplace was dominated by altogether different kinds of sensations. The Exorcist and The Sting became cultural juggernauts while Papillon, Serpico and Magnum Force were also major hits. Poor Dolphin had to announce itself as something audiences hadn’t quite learned to want yet.  

And that’s the biggest contradiction of all: it’s a science-fiction movie that doesn’t really want to be a science-fiction movie.

Nichols and Henry seem almost embarrassed by their premise. Whenever Fa begins to feel magical, the picture retreats into exposition. Whenever the conspiracy threatens to become exciting, it slows down to further explain itself. Whenever the dolphins threaten to become the emotional center of the story, human intrigue takes over. The film keeps putting its most extraordinary idea back in a cage. That’s especially frustrating because the dolphins are so darn good.

Fa and his mate Bi don’t feel like special effects. They have weight, movement and personality. The production went to extraordinary lengths to train the animals, with Peter Moss working with them for months before shooting began. William A. Fraker’s widescreen cinematography gives the marine sequences an almost tactile beauty while Georges Delerue’s score supplies the melancholy that Nichols seems reluctant to acknowledge.

The most affecting element of The Day of the Dolphin isn’t the conspiracy plot, but its sadness. Jake has discovered something wonderful then realizes the government wants to use it for nefarious purposes.

That’s a deeply American idea.

The movie understands that scientific progress isn’t necessarily moral progress. The ability to communicate with another species doesn’t make human beings better, it merely gives humans something else to exploit.

That’s why the picture feels unexpectedly contemporary. The dolphins aren’t the monsters; we are. And that could explain why its reputation has improved exponentially over the decades. The film’s anxieties about technological power, military applications of science and the commercialization of intelligence no longer seem fanciful. What once felt like an eccentric fantasy now looks like an early warning about the increasingly complicated relationship between scientific discovery and the institutions that pay for it.

But there’s another sadness attached to the picture. The Day of the Dolphin is one of those movies whose unrealized alternatives are nearly as fascinating as the finished product.

There’s  Polanski’s Dolphin, a darker, more psychologically disturbing film that might have transformed the material into something closer to a paranoid nightmare.

Schaffner’s version  may have leaned into the Planet of the Apes/Patton director’s gift for large-scale institutional drama and political machinery.

And there’s the Nichols movie we actually have: elegant, intelligent, beautifully made and oddly hesitant.

Maybe that hesitation was inevitable.

This was still the New Hollywood, but it was before the blockbuster had taught studios how to package its eccentricities. A director like Nichols could make a film about talking dolphins because the old Hollywood machinery had temporarily loosened enough to allow it. But nobody had yet figured out how to sell talking dolphins as a cinematic “event.”

Four years later, Hollywood would know. That’s what makes The Day of the Dolphin such a fascinating historical artifact. It’s caught between suspicion and wonder; between the paranoid ’70s and the spectacular ’70s; between Polanski’s nightmare and Spielberg’s awe. And perhaps adjacent to those competing sensibilities is the movie that The Day of the Dolphin”might have been.

I don’t want anyone to remake Nichols’ film, or try to “fix” it. The oddness is part of its charm.

It’s a movie that doesn’t quite know what it is, and that uncertainty is inseparable from the period in which it was made. Yet, watching it today, one can’t help thinking about an alternate history.

What if Polanski had directed it? 

What if Nichols had waited five years to make it?

What if audiences had already learned from Close Encounters that a film could ask them to look at another form of intelligent life with wonder rather than suspicion?

What if Star Wars had already taught Hollywood that the strange and fantastic could be the most commercial things in the world?

Perhaps The Day of the Dolphin still would have failed; maybe not.

But I suspect that in the summer of 1978 — after audiences had already lined up to see aliens reach across the stars and a galaxy far, far away — the movie’s central proposition would have seemed less like a parlor game and more like an invitation.

What if we weren’t alone in our intelligence?

What if something else could look back at us?

And what if we were the species to fear?

That’s the premise for a pretty good science-fiction flick.

In 1973, America wasn’t quite ready for it. By 1978, maybe it would have been.  

Movie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of theMovie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of the Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan  ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades:  at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/ Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan  ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades:  at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/