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The blu-Ray gives you all three variations of the film. I recommend the Director’s Cut.
In 1977 George Lucas and Steven Spielberg proved to Hollywood that there was a vast audience for science fiction films if they were made as A, not B-movies and given a large enough budget to look realistic. Spielberg had quickly moved from a director of popular TV movies for Universal (“Duel”), to a shockingly huge hit with “Jaws” which made over twenty times its budget. That was the kind of thing Hollywood noticed. There was great pressure on him, with the question being “Could he do it again or was “Jaws”a fluke?” For a young director that was a question on which his future career depended. He came through spectacularly with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
Spielberg was at this time a young, mostly self-taught director who worked intuitively. On both films he ran wildly over schedule due to his propensity to think up new scenes at home which often required testing out new effects to see how they worked. A perfectionist by nature, he also went considerably over budget, his original estimate of 2.7 million ballooning to 19 million. Ordinarily studios would have written him off, but the popularity of the films was so gigantic that instead, it heralded a new era of filmmaking. He began working on ideas for his new film while working on “The Sugarland Express” and when offered “Jaws II,” he said no. He went very counterintuitively and decided (in a sense) to remake “Firelight”, a movie he made when he was seventeen and still in high school. That film was about scientists investigating UFOs and their effect on a community, played by students from his Phoenix high school. It actually got a one-night showing in 1964 at a local theater and was attended by over 500 people. He was also inspired by the time his father woke him in the middle of the night to drive to the country to watch a meteor shower, an event which instilled in him the wonder of the night sky. He actually includes a scene like this in “Close Encounters” though with a less wondrous result.
Over time the idea grew and he went through several screenwriters and scripts until he decided to write it himself with the idea of an abducted child and the mood of the song, “When You Wish Upon a Star”. Because of his success with “Jaws”, Columbia gave him a lot of artistic control. It was produced by Julia and Michael Phillips, who had produced “The Sting” and “Taxi Driver”. While developing it he asked the Air Force and NASA for technical and anecdotal help and not only did both turn him down but NASA sent him a twenty-page letter telling him not to make it. This only served to convince him that he should make it and may account for the portrait of government forces in the film. He did receive help from talking with scientists including J.Allen Hynek, once a member of Project Bluebook, who created the “Encounters” index years before and who appears briefly in a blue suit at Devil’s Tower. He also talked with astronomer, engineer and author Jacques Vallee, the basis of the character Claude Lacombe. In addition to his technical and scientific books, he also wrote books about “the UFO mystery” and had actually moved away from the extraterrestrial hypothesis to a more esoteric, multi dimensional universe theory. Spielberg grew up in the 1950s and 60s, the heyday of UFOs - a subject that just wouldn’t go away no matter how much the government dismissed it. He told Vallee he was probably right, but his theory was vague and complex and he wanted to give people what they were expecting and that was extraterrestrials. His film neatly sums up the history of the UFO phenomenon up to that time.
The resulting film is full of Spielberg’s fertile imagination and everything he had learned by watching hundreds of movies over time. From the start you know you are in for something different. Right away he throws you into the total confusion of a sandstorm, howling wind, dialogue in Spanish and the sudden arrival of a dusty Dodge from which come French scientific investigator Lacombe (Francois Truffaut) and his translator, David Laughlin ( a barely recognizable Bob Balaban with a heavy beard). There are planes in the Sonoran Desert, still operable planes from Flight 19 that disappeared in late 1945. We begin to catch on. From there it’s a quick jump to a chaotic air traffic control center in Indianapolis where pilots are reporting seeing something amazing but will not make that an official report because they’d probably never be allowed to fly again. Another jump to an old white farmhouse surrounded by flat fields and a vast, starry sky (the skies here, if you watch them closely, often have lights moving in them). Here we meet Jillian Guiler and her four-year-old son, Barry, who are having a night like no other with toys self-activating and the refrigerator dumping out its contents while Barry’s record player plays “The Square Song”.
A fast jump takes us to the suburban home of Roy and Ronnie Neary and their three children where we find Roy to be a father willing to take time out to help his son with homework and who has a kids sense of humor himself. He’s suddenly called away for the night of his life that will change his whole world. In eighteen minutes, Spielberg has introduced all the main characters, given enough exposition to give the audience a sense of what is happening and set the film off on its course to places unknown.The Sonoran Desert opening was an afterthought that Spielberg added as a pickup along with several more that gave what he called a “wow factor” beyond its Indiana setting. There’s the famous scene in India with mountains in the distance and a thousand extras chanting and the brief trip to the Gobi Desert that added a world-event scope. In each case we get something unexpected.
Spielberg intuitively knows the basic setups of film scenes and he uses this to surprise or confound the audience. At one point a new visitation by UFOs is set up and the flow of the scene as well as the score leads the audience to expect something wondrous, only to have it turn out otherwise. A simple overhead shot of Roy’s lineman’s truck speeding down a country road would usually be used just to establish the general sense of where he is, becoming so much more dramatic when a large, saucer shaped shadow passes over it (in the director’s cut). In a joking scene, Roy twice waves a car behind him to pass, with a surprise the second time. This kind of playing with the expectations of the audience goes on throughout the film. Then there’s the abduction of Barry, one of the most famous episodes in the film. Here, the director showed that he could make light itself a form of terror, whether bright white lights from above or the orange phantasmagoria that appears when Barry opens the door. Spielberg was a wizard at lighting. The original pace of the film dragged somewhat in the middle, but the director’s cut fixed that with new editing. Columbia had to borrow money from EMI and Time Inc. just to complete the film. Originally scheduled for summer 1977 release, Spielberg wanted six more months to work on it in fall and then release it in summer, 1978. But Columbia was out of money and needed to release it “as is” for the holidays in November/December.
Of course he didn’t do this alone. The actors all came through, with Richard Dreyfus a perfect everyman partly because the audience didn’t know him as well as the bigger names Spielberg had considered, notably Steve McQueen. Melinda Dillon is wonderful as a caring mother driven by a search for her son. Their reunion is an emotional high point in the film. Her son, Barry, played by four-year-old Cary Guffey, was helped in his performance by the director on a ladder getting him to look up and smile by holding boxes of toys. His response in one scene is unscripted. Spielberg asked esteemed French New Wave director FrancoisTruffault if he would consider acting in it and to his surprise he said yes after reading the script. Lacombe adds a lot of humanity to the film as the person who best understands what is going on. Terry Garr is totally sympathetic as Ronnie, a wife tragically watching her husband and family life crumble before her eyes.
He was also assisted by a stellar group of assistants including cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (“The Deer Hunter”), film editor Michael Kahn who has edited most of Spielberg’s films, special effects master Douglas Trumbull (“2001: A Space Odyssey”), model maker Ralph McQuarrie (“Star Wars”) and others. Of course this was the third collaboration of Spielberg and composer John Williams. Here Williams did a dual score with parts that are traditional symphonic melodies and other, more abstract sections that enhance what is going on without melodic development. It’s a powerful score that matches this powerful film.
One of the most persistent Spielberg themes began here, which is that magical or extraordinary events can occur even in a mundane setting like twentieth century suburban America. He also made a rare, optimistic film of an alien visitation to earth, which they usually come to conquer. It has become fashionable for some critics to be dismissive of Spielberg. They dislike his warm, family friendly sensibility and think of it as sentimentalism. From the late 60s on it became fashionable to be cynical and to prefer the trope of the tortured artist, the anti-hero and the outsider. Spielberg felt ordinary people could be heroic too, but touches on subjects like artistic obsession with Roy’s dilemma. With this film, Spielberg showed that he was a master filmmaker with few peers. “Close Encounters” leaves a few questions, but is a marvel of a film with a final half hour that is still spectacular and with Spielberg, spectacle still included a deep emotional resonance.
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind
My third favorite film of all time (no pun intended) a movie with a brilliant quality to it and great performances all around. The musical score is beautiful so are the visual aspects.
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Hans Peter wernerReviewed in Germany on March 2, 2025
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Für den Preis von 25€ ist der Innenfilter, Schrott. Der Innenfilter ist keine 5€ wert. Das nächste mal kaufe ich wieder Eheim oder sonstiges. rtReviewed in Germany on March 2, 2025
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