A Close Encounter Anniversary

Way to make me feel old - it's the 40th anniversary of the release of the Spielberg classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the New York Times has a good story  looking back at its reception at the time.   (The movie's also getting a short remastered re-release in the US, which I think I read on Reddit is actually back to the original version, dropping the later tagged on scenes within the spaceship, which I didn't really care for.   Some things are best left unseen.)

I really liked it from first viewing, which was with high school friends, and it was probably the first Spielberg movie that I saw at the cinema.  (I didn't see Jaws for quite a long time later, and I still tend to think it is a relatively minor work in the Spielberg catalogue - it's more like a preamble showing what he would capable of later.) 

But Close Encounters - it was quite a joy because I had read serious books about UFOs in my teenage years, including those by J Allen Hynek, the astronomer who was always the most credible writer on the topic and who appears briefly in the film.   It was therefore clear to me that Spielberg was incorporating elements from some credible, still unsolved, sightings of the last 20 years from the US in particular.   (He is credited with the screenplay.)   I knew by this time that the Bermuda Triangle books were nonsense, so I wasn't as keen to see that element in the film, but hey, it made for some great images.

It was the film that showed me that Spielberg was a smart guy and natural wit too - as with Poltergeist*,  one of the things I have loved about him is his ability to combine humour and shivers in the one shot or sequence.   My favourite example from CE3K:  our hero's first encounter with a UFO while stopped on the road in his van - shot face on through the windscreen so we can see another car come up from behind, stop, and then drive around him.  Next set of lights (looking again like it could be a vehicle) approaches, stops, and then slowly rises in the air, unnoticed by Roy until he is blasted in bright light from above.   Just a brilliant idea, so well executed.   I don't really know of any other director who has done that type of nervous laugh scare so well.

Spielberg himself has claimed in much later interviews that, with his large extended family of many kids, he couldn't write a movie like that now, with a father effectively abandoning his children.  But the fact it happens is key to the film having a semi-religious feel about it - suggesting as it does that there are matters of greater transcendent importance than family ties.  And besides, we don't really know if he is going to be whisked away for 30 years, or just a week.

So, a great film that I would be happy to see again in its original format.    Long live Spielberg.

*(OK, he is just the writer on that one, and the director Tobe Hooper died just last week, but Spielberg was definitely on the set a lot too)

Update:  Homer mentions Duel in the comments, which I am pretty sure I saw on TV before I saw Close Encounters.  I didn't see it on the cinema release it got overseas.  I did enjoy it a lot, but for whatever reason, I don't think I have ever seen it a second time.   So Close Encounters was the first Spielberg at the cinema.