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Orca (1977)
If orca whales are going to keep attacking boats in the Strait of Gibraltar, it was only a matter of time before someone did the responsible thing and put Orca back in a theater.
Critically harpooned in its day as a shaky Jaws rip-off, Orca (which screens at the Academy, along with Free Willy) did little to dispel that reputation. Executive producer Dino De Laurentiis explicitly asked for a “fish” antagonist bigger than a great white shark and bankrolled a whale-revenge thriller in which Richard Harris essentially plays Captain Quint and Charlotte Rampling is the marine biologist (Jaws cameraman Ron Taylor even provided shark b-roll).
Orca feels Frankensteined together by director Michael Anderson (Logan’s Run), but many of its pieces are unimpeachable. Ennio Morricone’s score lends romance and longing to the plight of the orcas hunted by Harris’ deathly hungover Ahab archetype, and there’s striking location cinematography of the Newfoundland fishing village attacked by a grieving whale.
Then there’s the orca itself—actually cast in the role of antihero—with shrieks of pain, rage and gloating no mere fish could muster. If Jaws is one of the great movies about fear, Orca is simply about whales. For that, it still deserves a long, piercing orca battle cry. Academy, July 7-11.
ALSO PLAYING:
Cinema 21: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), July 8. Cinemagic: The Thing (1982), July 6. Brain Damage (1988), July 7. Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird (1985), July 8. Clinton: Under the Skin (2013), July 6. Xanadu (1980), July 7. The Hidden (1987), July 8. Solaris (1972), July 10. Hollywood: The Maltese Falcon (1941), July 6. Grease 2 (1982), July 7. The Big Lebowski (1998), July 8. Waiting for Guffman (1996), July 9. Frida (2002), July 9. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), July 10.
