United States

Based on a novel by the French author, Robert Merle, and adpated for the screen by Buck Henry, "The Day of the Dolphin," tells the story of a scientist's obsession with a unique experiment and of the emotional and political environment created by that experiment, an environment that ultimately imperils both his work and, indeed, his life. Jake Terrell, played by George C. Scott, is a marine biologist whose Center for the study of Cretaceans - that genus of mammals to which dolphins, porpoises and whales belong - is based on a small island off the coast of Florida. Jake and his wife, Maggie (Trish Van Devere), assisted by a quintet of ocean tanks, concrete pools and indoor laboratories specially constructed for the care of and the investigation into the behavior of dolphins. For four years, Terrell has concentrated his effirts on an experiment with one of the animals - a dolphin named Alpha - with whom he has built a relationship that goes far beyond that of master and child. In a sense, the dolphin, born and raised at the Center, is Jake's child - and it is this relationship that is both the psychological center of the film and the key to Jake's single-minded desire to achieve a monumental breakthrough in the history of man's investigation into the behavior of living things - inter-species communication; a working language between man and animal. Inevitably, certain forces from the outside world intrude-one of them represented by Harold DeMilo (Fritz Weaver), Jake's friend and sponsor, and one of the chief executives of the Franklin Foundation, an organisation which provides the funds for the operation of the Terrell Center. The second intruding force appears in the form of a mysterious stranger named Mahoney (Paul Sorvino) whose apparently benign interest in Jake's research sets off a series of events in which all of the relationships-man to man's and man to animal's-are called into question. Caught in an agonizing tug of war between his emotional commitment to his experiment and the outside world's insistence on using his accomplishments for its own puposes, Jake finds himself and his friends trapped in a nightmare of politcal intrigue and tragedy.