CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

   Film (1977). Columbia. Dir Steven SPIELBERG, starring Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Cary Guffey, Bob Balaban. Screenplay Spielberg. 135 mins. Colour.

   After STAR WARS came the second major sf film production of 1977, at over twice the cost but with a story which, while lacking the comic-book appeal of Star Wars, perhaps cuts deeper in its evocation, rare in sf CINEMA, of a SENSE OF WONDER. A power company technician (Dreyfuss) witnesses a series of UFO appearances and develops an obsession with them which is almost religious in its nature and intensity. He becomes convinced that aliens plan to land one of their craft on an oddly shaped mountain in Wyoming. A parallel plot concerns a secret group of scientific and military experts also engaged in uncovering the secret of the UFOs. The film ends in a barrage of special effects when the spacecraft arrives; communication between the two species is achieved by means of bursts of light and music. The hero enters the mother ship, much as Tam Lin once entered the Fairy Mound, and is taken to the Heavens in a glowing apotheosis; the elfishness of the slim aliens supports a reading in which UFO occupants are mythically equivalent to fairies. CEOTTK has flaws, but remains an intensely evocative work, certainly one of the half dozen best sf films to date. Despite the pressure from Columbia to produce a financial blockbuster, Spielberg did not take the easy way out but made an intelligent and relatively complex film, maintaining the high standards he had set himself in Duel (1971) and Jaws (1978). The special effects are excellent. A different version, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND - THE SPECIAL EDITION, was released in 1980.The novelization, Close Encounters of the Third Kind * (1977), is as by Spielberg.

   JB

   See also: HISTORY OF SF; LINGUISTICS; MUSIC.