Close Encounters of the Third Kind ***** (1977, Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Bob Balaban) – Classic Movie Review 306

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, sci-fi movies were considered out of date and box-office poison. It took the 70s movie brats to bring them back. Take a bow, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Released in the same year as Star Wars, Steven Spielberg’s brilliant, deservedly acclaimed, hugely admired and much loved 1977 blockbuster sci-fi movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind put the then dormant genre firmly back in business, where of course it has stayed to live long and prosper.

The 30-year-old Richard Dreyfuss is ideal as an electrical line worker called Roy Neary, the Ordinary Joe kind of hero who has set out to investigate a power leak when his truck stalls on a deserted road. He is dazzled in glaring light from the skies and finds he has encountered a passing UFO.

Then strange visions keep running through his head and he keeps creating the same weird, unknown shape out of shaving foam or mashed potato or whatever. Next he feels drawn to an isolated area in the wilderness where something spectacular is about to happen and so he is somehow led by strange impulses to a secret place in Indiana, where it turns out the UFO is landing.

Teri Garr plays his exasperated, uncomprehending wife Ronnie, increasingly alienated from him, and very much upset when Roy becomes obsessed with creating a huge weird model of the Devil’s Tower National Monument, Wyoming, with trash, bricks and chicken wire in his living room.

Oscar nominated Melinda Dillon is outstanding as Jillian Guiler, the sympathetic woman he meets along the way in Muncie, Indiana, and little Cary Guffey (only 3½ years old) makes his mark as her continually missing son Barry. As Roy is increasingly distanced from his unsympathetic wife and three children, he finds himself drawn to Jillian as well as to the site of the UFOs.

And French film director François Truffaut is very effective playing Claude Lacombe, the somewhat mad-seeming scientist who becomes obsessed with five musical notes and eventually contacts the ETs with blasts from John Williams’s famous music score – those five musical notes. Dreyfuss’s nine-year-old nephew Justin plays his son, Toby. Bob Balaban also makes an impression as David Laughlin, the cartographer who acts as Lacombe’s French translator.

If Spielberg’s story is self-consciously borrowed in homage to those of 1950s flying saucer space B-movies, the staging is entirely of the late 1970s. Spielberg has sole credit for the screenplay, though four other writers worked on it with him. They are Hal Barwood, Jerry Belson, John Hill and Matthew Robbins.

A thrilling roller coaster ride, Close Encounters has got pace, tension, humanity, heart and, at the climax, incredible emotional uplift that brings tears to many eyes. At an estimated just under $20 million, it is a vastly costly, hugely confident and wonderfully effective movie. A nervy Columbia Pictures needn’t have worried about their huge investment. It grossed $116 million in the US in 1978 and another $15 million there on its 1980 re-release. Admittedly, hindsight is 20/20 vision.

Surprisingly it won just the one Oscar – for Hungarian-born Vilmos Zsigmond’s dazzling cinematography, though there were seven more nominations. It is Zsigmond’s only Oscar, though he was nominated for The Deer Hunter (1978), The River (1984) and The Black Dahlia (2006). All these are Oscar worthy and he ought to have won for Heaven’s Gate too and possibly for McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971). He won a single Bafta for Best Cinematography – for The Deer Hunter (1978).

Vilmos Zsigmond died on January 1 2016, aged 85.

Frank E Warner won a Special Achievement Award for the sound effects editing. The director, original score, best supporting actress (Dillon), art direction-set decoration, film editing, sound and special visual effects (Douglas Trumbull, Roy Arbogast) were also Oscar nominated.

The Special Edition re-release of 1980, running at 132 minutes, three minutes shorter than the original, trims the slight longueurs of the film’s middle section and gives more of the close encounter with the aliens, to general great satisfaction.

Spielberg asked the Columbia studio to be able to re-cut the picture and shoot additional sequences. The studio agreed on condition he included new scenes showing the inside of the alien mother ship to entice audiences back into the cinema again.

Spielberg was given a budget of $1.5 million and seven weeks to shoot the new sequences. He had to use a different director of photography (Allen Daviau, who shot the African sequences) because Vilmos Zsigmond was unavailable, but most of the original cast re-appeared, apart from Truffaut, who was filming elsewhere. This is the best version of the four versions of the movie. Spielberg regards the 1978 film as a work in progress that he had to deliver to the studio before it was properly finished.

The Collector’s Edition of 1998 (video) and 2001 (DVD) is 137 minutes.

The complete TV and laserdisc versions use all available footage at 143 minutes.

The Director’s Cut combines elements of the 1977 original and the 1980 Special Edition and is Spielberg’s definitive edit, running 137 minutes. There are no scenes showing the inside of the alien mother ship. It screens in a new 35 millimeter print at London’s BFI Southbank from 27 May 2016.

Spielberg greatly admired Douglas Slocombe’s second unit cinematography on Close Encounters (the Indian sequences) and called for him again to work on all three Eighties Indiana Jones movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Slocombe celebrated his 100th birthday on February 10 2013. He was famous for never using a light meter, a usually indispensable tool for cinematographers.

Douglas Slocombe died on February 22 2016, aged 103.

Melinda Dillon died on January 9, 2023, at the age of 83. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her roles as Jillian Guiler in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Teresa Perrone in Absence of Malice (1981). She is also known for A Christmas Story (1983), Bound for Glory (1976), F.I.S.T. (1978), Harry and the Hendersons (1987), The Prince of Tides (1991), and Magnolia (1999),

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 306

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