Review – Day of the Dolphin

This is like Flipper cut with a heavy dose of the peculiar political paranoia endemic to many movies of the mid-70s. The plot here starts out with a scientist (poor, long-suffering George C. Scott) who has managed to train a dolphin to speak English, or at least produce a really annoying semblance of baby talk. Then out comes the heavy hand of the message piece. Is it ethical to keep intelligent animals in captivity and coerce them into adopting unnatural behavior patterns? What if the big corporation that’s footing the bill for the research center starts making noise about seeing some return on its investment? And worse still, what if the return the evil suits have in mind is a little sea mammal complicity in a plot to assassinate the President by sticking mines on the bottom of his yacht? This might actually have been a better movie if director Mike Nichols had just spent a little less time on the extended, pointless, dolphin-swimming-in-a-tank shots at the beginning and left himself a bit more screen time toward the end to flesh out the political intrigue just a bit more. Mildly amusing