Let's face it all of us want to believe in UFO's and, many of us do. Back in those dark dismal days of the 70's we were all largely just waiting for the mother ship to pitch up and whisk us all off to Alpha Centauri, or some such place. In the event, sadly, no one came. However, in 1977 a chap popped up called Spielberg who had decided that he would bring to the screen his vision of what it would be like if a race of benign and benevolent beings from across the universe decided to make Earth a stopover. Spielberg was still basking in the afterglow of the blockbusting success of Jaws, his first major movie released in 1975. This follow-up was to cement his reputation as a deliverer of bankable summer must-see movies and E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark were still in the future.
Firstly, it has to be said that everything else aside, one of the primary reasons for the success of the film was undoubtedly the public's hunger at that time for effects laden sci-fi which had been kick started by the release of Star Wars. The audience was the same and also, at that time, the "event" movies were few and far between so movies like Close Encounters benefited from repeat visits. Also, the emergence of new film technologies, coupled with the uninhibited visions of the clutch of new wave wunderkind directors (Lucas, De Palma etc.) was delivering jaw-dropping special effects, the like of which had never been seen before. It is all to easy to forget in these ho-hum days of CGI that, back then, the spectacle of the mother ship turning itself upside down over Devil's Tower and a battered X-Wing taking on a Death Star were hugely impressive, breathtaking, in fact.
The release of Close Encounters was premature at the time because Spielberg's vision was not quite complete and when he was given an extra $2m to film some additional scenes he came up with Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition, which was released in 1980. Following on from that, there have been several different versions of the film but the best and most satisfying was undoubtedly the first theatre release. The extra 15 minutes of footage shot for the Special Edition, largely concentrating on the experiences of Richard Dreyfuss in the alien ship at the end, add nothing to the story and in retrospect even Spielberg has admitted that this was a mistake. It represented the gilding of an already superb lily.
Spielberg turned to Dr. J. Allen Hynek, one of the world's foremost UFO experts and between them they attempted to craft a theory of what first contact with an alien race would be like. Interestingly, they came up with the struggle to communicate and understand rather than F11's firing nukes at a craft the size of Manhattan. This is to be applauded and probably illustrates some of the more socialist thinking of the time. Certainly, it could be argued with a reasonable degree of certainty that any race that had managed to collaborate to build the craft required to travel interstellar distances had probably gotten overt the need to make war by then. The magic of the final encounter is reflected in the upturned faces of the awed scientists and not in the faces of hard-bitten marines and is a theme Spielberg would return to at the end of E.T.
There are three principal characters in Close Encounters; Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), the everyman power worker telepathically tuned in to the visitors, Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) whose young son has been abducted by the visitors and finally Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut), a UN scientist. The film follows the path of each of them to the destiny that awaits them at Devil's Tower in Wyoming, the chosen site of the alien visitation.. The casting was pretty much perfect Dreyfuss had lobbied Spielberg furiously to get the role (Steve McQueen was the first choice) and actually fitted the role perfectly. François Truffaut was a coup for Spielberg who didn't expect the great director to say yes to the part. In the event, he too fitted his part like a glove and was able to play the beguiled and dignified Lacombe at a perfect pitch. Being French also gave it an international air and not US centric, which also helped the movie.
Other collaborators on the movie included composer John Williams who has given most of Spielberg's movies their unique cinematic atmosphere down through the years and Douglas Trumbull whose special effects, as mentioned earlier were of a quality not seen before even in Star Wars. It could be reasonably argued that the real "star" of Close Encounters is the mother ship; that "wow" factor ranks alongside your first sight of a Jurassic Park dinosaur, your first experience of Titanic's CGI imagery, when CGI was young, or the climatic battle of Return of the King. In the seventies - it was simply awe inspiring.
I was privileged to see Close Encounters in the cinemas the day it was released in the UK and it has stayed in my imagination from that time. It is a film of the cinema and for the cinema. It is diminished on the television and our savvy kids will see nothing but a rather long melodrama with some spaceships. ID4 it ain't and it's all the better for it! 10/10
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