It's not Jaws, honest!
What can you say about a movie that tries to be everything but ends up being nothing? Orca tries very hard -or at least harder than a film like this normally does- to be full of literary illusions, meditations upon man's sense of guilt, revenge, and place in nature but still ends up being a whack-ass knock-off of Jaws.
Orca is proudly declared to be a Dino De Laurentiis [yep, it's him again!] presentation. I don't know exactly what he did with the movie other than present it to the public, but you know you're in for a certain type of film when you get De Laurentiis' name attached to something. The man has produced well over a hundred films, "presented" even more, and absolutely none of them are any good. That's an oversimplification and, truth be told, I rather like some of the films he produced [presented or whatever] but Dino's never been shy about slapping his name onto any old thing that comes along. I guess the box office returns for Jaws were too tempting for De Laurentiis to pass up so he decided he needed his own man-eating critter in the water movie. Since that's a limited genre -the shark thing had just been done, dollars to donuts somebody was already working on a film about pirahna, and man-eating squid are hard to pull off convincingly on film- so a killer whale became the high concept beastie of choice.
In Orca crusty, old Richard Harris plays crusty, old Captain Nolan, a fisherman who has hit upon the get rich quick scheme of capturing sea life and selling it to aquariums. I didn't know there was good money to be found in free-lance aquarium stocking but it seems if you can't find an opportunity you can always make one. One day when out trying to catch a killer whale he misses the male he was aiming for and accidentally skewers it's mate. Naturally every damn fool thing goes wrong and the female and it's unborn calf die. Wailing in grief as his family dies, Orca glares at Nolan with one of it's eyes [I'm not sure a killer whale can even look at a person with both of it's eyes at the same time very effectively] as the wheels of fate begin to turn. Orca is, at it's heart, a standard revenge flick with one of it's participants being played by a killer whale.
Nolan, as played by Richard Harris, is crotchety, alcoholic, and a lot like what I pictured Richard Harris to be like in real life with the exception of smelling like sea spray and fish innards. Charlotte Rampling, fresh from her work on Zardoz, is Rachel Bedford, a scientist who becomes a foil for Nolan and who has a flair for showing stock footage of killer whales during her lectures. I'm not sure what Bo Derek is doing in the movie but that complaint can be leveled at most of her turns on the big screen.
I have nothing really to say about director Michael Anderson other than that he went on to make Summer of the Monkeys. I've personally never seen Summer of the Monkeys but I've always enjoyed the images the film's title invokes so I try to make reference to it as much as I can. Just think, the man who directed such films as Logan's Run and Orca took that lifetime of experience and directed Summer of the Monkeys. I like monkeys.
While more or less on the subject of behind the scenes Orca work I would be remiss if I didn't mention the work Ennio Morricone did on the sound-track. Most of it is enjoyably European [if there's such a thing as a European sound] but the Orca love theme "We Love, We Are One" -with music by Morricone and lyrics by Carol Conners- has to be heard to be believed. I think the song is about the love that only one killer whale can feel for another killer whale but the lyrics are so random that it's hard to be sure. It's a stunning ending to a movie that plays like the movie itself had somehow been stunned.
Orca would be an easy enough movie to dismiss -especially after the scene where Orca shows he's somehow smart enough to blow up a town by banging on a few gas pipes- if it wasn't for the literary cribbing the movie does. Not content with making a Jaws knock-off, someone penning the script apperantly decided that the film needed to be a modern re-telling of Moby Dick. Observe: Nolan's quest for personal redemption by making amends with Orca is a stand-in for Ahab's monomanical quest for the White Whale. Nolan drags his crew and boat to oblivion in much the same way as Ahab dooms the Pequod. Bedford becomes the Ishmael of the story, a character who is unable to alter events but survives in order to be the witness that can relate the events after they have occured. There's even a Native American character [Will Sampson as Umilak] who talks in simplified but profound movie-Indian dialogue and seems to be in the movie solely as a stand in for Queequeg and the other muliticultural characters that make up the crazy extended family of Moby Dick. True, Orca seems rather small and vindictive when compared to everything Moby Dick stands for but you can't have everything. There are a few other small differences -such as that Moby Dick is good while Orca isn't- but otherwise the two stories are nearly identical.
Bear in mind that I have no proof of any of this and that it all may be a product of my imagination but the two stories fit together far too well for this to be a coincidence. That, or I'm still hesitent about taking the plunge on starting my Moby Dick internet shrine so I'm circling about the subject and only discussing the novel in roundabout ways [much the same way that it took Melville 30-odd pages before he actually started Moby Dick's plot.] At some point I will truly begin work on the page that Moby Dick deserves, but until then I'll keep circling around it, discussing not-quite related topics like Orca until I build up the gumption to discuss Moby Dick in all it's massive glory. Until that fateful day you can go and check out Orca while you wait. Or not.
Questions, comments, and whale sightings can be sent to gleep9@hotmail.com. Set sail on out of here to either the Third Movie or Main page.