Talking animals don't turn up in tense assassination thrillers very often. The TV series 24 doesn't feature a wisecracking chimpanzee clumsily trying to operate a cellphone while precious minutes tick away. And yet, there is The Day of the Dolphin (1973), a nail-biting thriller in which a verbose porpoise is instrumental in a cunning assassination plot. To quote the film's tagline, “Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the president of the United States.”
The trouble is, political thrillers rely on realism, and talking animals are inherently goofy. Especially if they have high-pitched helium-squeaky voices. As a result, The Day of the Dolphin got bad reviews, but is still remembered by viewers who can't believe it got made in the first place.
George C. Scott plays a marine biologist who trains a dolphin to speak English. We see lots of amazing footage of trained dolphins doing remarkable things, culminating in super-dolphin Alpha opening his pointy maw and bellowing “Hi!” This looks and sounds amazingly realistic, but gets a laugh of disbelief from the audience because it's just so weird. No puppets or animated mouths are used — instead, we get dubbed-in bleats from screenwriter Buck Henry, mixed in with actual dolphin sounds. The whole image is so bizarre that one can't shake the feeling what we're seeing might just be real after all.
The assassination angle comes later. Alpha, the loquacious dolphin, is stolen by a shadowy organization and trained to carry magnetized explosives on its back. The bad guys intend to kill the president by blowing up his yacht. Can George C. send his remaining super dolphin to foil the plot in time?
The Day of the Dolphin was actually shown to my entire class in elementary school. I have no idea what we were supposed to learn from it; we were just happy to take a break from studies for the afternoon. We dozed off during the political intrigue, but completely flipped out whenever the dolphins were speaking. Best of all was the finale (spoiler alert!), when Alpha's mate talks him into blowing up the bad guy's boat instead of the presidential yacht. The villain realizes this betrayal mere seconds before the explosion. He peers out at the dolphins with his binoculars, realizes that Alpha isn't carrying the bomb anymore, and mutters “Oh shit!” just before his boat is blown to smithereens. Everybody in the school gym laughed their heads off. We couldn't believe that our teachers would show us a film in which the single most unforgettable line was “Oh shit.” Our glee was flavoured with the extra spice of the teachers' embarrassed reactions.
Coincidentally, 1973 also saw the release of The Day of the Jackal, one of the most famous assassination thrillers ever made. Sadly, that film does not feature a talking jackal.
