Trailer
Plot summary
A research team funded by the Franklin Foundation studies dolphins at an island facility and keeps its real work secret. Jake Terrell and Maggie, his wife, have taught a dolphin named Alpha to speak and understand English. Alpha, born at the station four years earlier and raised by the team, has lately stopped talking, and they believe his maturity is the cause, so they bring in a female dolphin called Beta. Alpha speaks again and teaches Beta as well. The Terrells tell only Harold DeMilo, their liaison at the Foundation, when he threatens to withdraw the funding, and he agrees to keep the news to himself. DeMilo then sends a visitor named Curtis Mahoney to tour the facility.
Cast
- Jon Korkesas David - Research Team
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Day of the Dolphin (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Roman Polanski was to write and direct the film for United Artists. In August 1969, while he was scouting locations in London, his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was murdered at their Beverly Hills home by Charles Manson's followers; Polanski went home and dropped the project.
- Producer Joseph Levine blamed his star and his director for the film: George C. Scott took $750,000, ran the picture over schedule and called in sick with a virus for the first three days of shooting.
- Although credited to Robert Merle's Cold War satire, the film leans on the real work of scientist John C. Lilly, who founded the Communications Research Institute on St. Thomas in 1959 and spent years there studying dolphin intelligence and human-dolphin communication.
