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• The Day of the Dolphin (1973)

No director ever seemed to have such a meteoric rise and fall than Mike Nichols. After leaving a successful career on Broadway in the mid 1960s, he quickly directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate (won the 1967 best director Oscar), then he nearly got laughed out of Hollywood in 1973 when he made The Day of the Dolphin.

This sci-fi political adventure featured the research of a marine biologist Dr. Jake Terrell (George C. Scott), who trains a pair of dolphins at a research institute to understand and speak rudimentary English. With nearly the spirit of a Jacque Cousteau documentary, Nichols shoots beautifully, almost ballet like underwater sequences of the fish. What first begins as an idealistic scientific investigation of the complex communication of an intelligent mammal quickly turns into a paranoid 1970s thriller when a group of businessmen and bureaucrats want to use the dolphins for assassination plots. Terrell, his research assistant wife, Maggie (Trish Van Devere) and his research team learn to not trust anyone when a journalist (Paul Sorvino) becomes suspicious of the team’s research and financial pressure is applied by a once trusted benefactor, Harold DeMilo (Fritz Weaver).

Scott delivers a consistently stern compassionate performance, which makes even the most unbelievable or implausible parts of the scientific speculations of the story more effective. Nichols’ big-budget treatment of this Robert Merle book was adapted by Buck Henry with a utopian optimism and even though it was roundly trashed by critics at the time, The Day of the Dolphin is certainly no cheap Doctor Doolittle for paranoid adults.