Michael Anderson’s Orca: The Killer Whale (1977), now on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, is one of those cursed 1970s projects that aren’t nearly so bad as their flop reputations would have you believe. Its producers seem to have shot themselves in the foot, or rather, speared themselves in the fin.
Orca: The Killer Whale opens with a vision of paradise. Behind a process shot juxtaposing a beautiful sky with killer whales leaping gracefully out of the ocean, Ennio Morricone‘s lush score channels dashes of his spaghetti-western guitar with his most lyrical winds. The abstract vocals of Edda Dell’Orso form a human counterpart to the squeals of the whales’ sonar as underwater photography takes us deeper into the romantic dance of the cetaceans. It’s one of several scenes where the viewer basks in the visual and sonic palette that conveys the story’s atmosphere, which soon becomes mournful and melancholy, even bitter.
Orca: The Killer Whale was received and reviewed as producer Dino De Laurentiis’ answer to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1976), and, indeed, Orca wouldn’t exist without Jaws. However, the story by screenwriters Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati, with uncredited polishing by Robert Towne, is a very personal drama less about “man vs. nature” than “man vs. himself”. Nor is it really a story about a struggle for survival so much as a downbeat parable of going to meet your destiny. In that sense, Orca: The Killer Whale is modeled more on Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851) and John Huston’s 1956 film, which are natural models for a whale story.
Richard Harris, who was specializing in survival adventures in the 1970s, plays Nolan, who runs a fishing ship called Bumpo. The name is probably intended to evoke Natty Bumppo, the hero in several novels by James Fenimore Cooper, such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Cooper also wrote naval adventures. Orca: The Killer Whale will bring up Native American mythology of whales, as represented by a figure named Umilak (Will Sampson), so perhaps the name Bumpo is preparing us for that.
Nolan takes an interest in college lectures by marine biologist Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling), who gives us exposition about the orcas. Nolan and Rachel have already met, non-cutely, in a scene where an orca saves Rachel’s colleague from a shark. “There’s only one creature in the world that could do that: the killer whale,” declares Rachel as they all stare at the bloody remains.
Nolan decides he could make money by capturing an orca and selling it to a marine park, although Rachel states that those whales are raised in captivity from pups. Nolan ignores her with a typical masculine swagger and snags a whale, leading to Orca: The Killer Whale‘s most painful and traumatic sequence. What happens is so grotesque and upsetting that everyone on board is shaken, including Nolan. We’ll later learn that he has personal reasons to identify with the male orca who loses his mate.
From that moment, Nolan is cursed and haunted, not unlike Captain Ahab, except that Ahab’s relationship with his whale is reversed. Nolan also brings increasing danger and economic destruction to the fishing village, where everyone correctly blames him for what’s happening. The now-mythic whale orca-strates one gloriously destructive sequence that echoes the gas station disaster in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1962). Just as the seagulls in Hitchcock’s film look with pleasure at their works and find it good, so does the whale in Orca: The Killer Whale glory and delight in his havoc.
Caught between the Scylla of the disapproving village and the Charybdis of the vengeful whale, Nolan is eventually forced to take Bumpo on a rendezvous with destiny in an arctic icefield. Before we get to the ice, there’s a magnificent foggy shot of Nolan standing like a grim statue on the ship’s prow as the Bumpo sails forth from the harbor, the silent chorus of taciturn townies watching it go. Sequences like this show off the photography of Ted Moore, which is often magnificent enough to make a whale dance.
In short, Orca: The Killer Whale is a mythic and visual spectacle that dramatizes Nolan’s depression and self-hatred, in which he has been out of tune with the natural world and himself. By recognizing his errors and aligning himself with the forces of nature he tried to dominate, he comes to a terrible rapprochement with the universe that wasn’t likely to satisfy many ’70s-era audiences looking for heroism. Perhaps that’s why they stayed away.
Critics were unkind by dismissing Orca: The Killer Whale as a Jaws copy and then faulting its differences from that model. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the film. The animatronic whales are integrated seamlessly, even distressingly, into the action. The fantastical closeup of reflective whale eyes, which echo similar eye shots in Huston’s Moby Dick, make it clear we’re in mythic rather than realistic territory. Models and sets are gorgeous, and Morricone’s score casts its spell.
The film’s primary flaw is the lack of characterization for anyone besides Nolan. The averted camera, dark lighting, and unclear editing make the several human deaths seem filmed post-production. The greatest undermining may have been the removal of footage to speed Orca: The Kille Whale into a 90-minute movie when it really wants to brood. One signal of this decision is that sometimes Rachel gives us voiceover to bridge scenes and developments, as though she’s the story’s Ishmael.
The commentary track by film historians Nathaniel Thompson, Howard S. Berger, and Steve Mitchell has Berger and Mitchell discussing their encounters with Harris, who stated that the script had much more information about all the characters and their motives. He expressed disappointment with the cutting of this material. Many fans would be interested if it were possible to assemble an expanded director’s cut, but that doesn’t seem feasible.
One example of missing characterization is Rampling’s co-starring role as the voice of ecological and scientific conscience, who at first believes Nolan is “an insensitive boor” and learns he’s really “a sensitive boor”. On one hand, there’s no good reason for Rampling to play this part as we now see it. On the other hand, any filmmakers who aren’t crazy would be glad to have her, for she brings gravity, intelligence, and glamour to a nothing role.
Then come Nolan’s other crew members, played by Sampson, Keenan Wynn (looking like a perfect grizzled sea dog, and gone before we know it), Peter Hooten (whose character is that he has a beard), blink-and-miss-him Robert Carradine (as Rachel’s colleague, whose presence on the final trip is unexplained), and imminent world superstar and sex symbol Bo Derek. Had the producers known what a sought-after star she would become, they’d surely have used every scrap of her footage.
Anderson is a British director known for handsome action-adventures and a few examples of science fiction. His most significant accomplishment was the Oscar-winning Best Picture Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which feels like an act of spectacle, and he delivered action-packed goods on items like The Dam Busters (1955) and Operation Crossbow (1965). He’d directed Harris in two of the actor’s earliest films in 1959, Shake Hands with the Devil and The Wreck of the Mary Deare. Anderson’s film previous to Orca: The Killer Whale had been the excellent Logan’s Run (1976), and he’d move on to an equally good mini-series of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1980).
The late film historian Lee Gambin, author of Massacred by Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film (2012), recorded a commentary on Orca: The Killer Whale for Shout Factory in 2020, and that highly informative track is retained by Kino Lorber. Gambin places Orca: The Killer Whale within the universe of ecological horror and animal revenge movies and discusses recurring tropes of sexual politics and Native American lore. He finds links with everything from Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin (1973) to Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People, which he identifies as an indirect inspiration to Jaws.
Kino Lorber’s disc is a UHD/Blu-ray combo from a 4K scan of the negative. Besides the commentaries, there are two Dolby soundtrack options. Orca: The Killer Whale may be a flawed movie as it stands, or floats, but this is undoubtedly the best it will look and sound, lovingly put together by people who care about its best possible presentation.