I watched Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1975) and the 1951 flying saucer picture The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise) as a double-feature.
I first saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a movie-house on Hennepin Avenue when I was a college student. I recall that the night was cold and white with falling snow. I felt a little delirious emerging from the theater. I think I had attended the movie alone. Apparently, three versions of the movie exist: the 1975 premiere cut, with its ending modified by studio demand (it's astonishing to think that someone would dare tinker with a Spielberg picture but the director was still a young prodigy in those days); a later version made when the picture was revived in the late 1990's in which a shot inside the "mother ship" to which Spielberg objected (but which was inserted in 1975) was omitted; and, at last, a restoration released as the "Director's Cut" in the first decade of the 21st century -- this latter version was shown on TCM and, apparently, incorporates footage retrieved from the studio and re-edited by Spielberg into the climactic "close encounter," a sequence apparently somewhat shortened in the first version.
Spielberg, at least in the early seventies, was one of cinema's greatest practitioners of film shot in wide-screen aspect. This is the most salient discovery that I made seeing the picture again after twenty or thirty years. Spielberg is endlessly inventive in finding ways to energize the panorama-size images, suffusing them with a taut rippling intensity -- the screen seems to shimmer with the graphic compositional force that Spielberg deploys to enliven his images. Some shots are composed in depth using deeply receding diagonals across the width of the screen -- Spielberg shifts the action back and forth along the diagonal axis. In other scenes, he shows us a standard pictorial composition of a frieze of people, a crowd or traffic or a line of boxcars, a flat horizontal composition that he enlivens by having someone or something swoop into the picture from off-screen to the right or left. In the climactic scenes of the alien encounter, Spielberg uses the wide-screen Panavision format as a measuring device -- the huge mother ship just exactly fits into the frame along its upper horizontal axis. When the three scout ships appear, they hang in the sky perfectly spaced, at intervals to illumine with orbs and halos of light the upper half of the screen. In some shots, an immobile figure, for instance the unmoving back of someone's head obstructs the center of the screen with the actors who are speaking or moving flanking the central figure, thereby, creating a strong sense of opposition and conflict in the picture. Spielberg isn't afraid to have his characters sprawl across the huge screen, crucified as it were against the frame's unforgiving left to right axis. In the scenes in which Richard Dreyfuss goes mad at his suburban home in Alabama -- terrifying his wife and children -- Spielberg composes in depth with the protagonist figures wrestling or battling one another in the foreground against choral groups of spectators ranged across the distance. When Terri Gar and Richard Dreyfuss shriek at one another, we can see the kids in the background, through a half-open door reacting in a violent frenzy.
Everyone recalls the flamboyant climax to the movie. I didn't remember the intensely violent domestic scenes dramatizing the hero's destructive obsession -- this stuff is more akin to bourgeois tragedy in a film like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, a movie roughly contemporary with Close Encounters. Spielberg's movie was made before MTV editing and incessant, meaningless camera movement became fashionable in popular cinema -- he's quite willing to let scenes play out in lengthy single takes, a kind of moviemaking that would seem almost avant-garde today. (In these long takes, Spielberg is revealed as a student, to some extent, of Stanley Kubrick, who often used similarly extended set-ups with a motionless camera, particularly in domestic scenes -- see, for instance, some of the sequences in Lolita). The other factor that is now evident is Spielberg couldn't get the ending of the movie right. Notwithstanding all his (nd the studio's) tinkering with final sequence, it's both beautiful and completely baffling. In the first version of the film, the viewer had the impression that Melinda Dillon and Richard Dreyfuss were scaling Devil's Tower and that the climax somehow takes place on top of the monumental plug of congealed lava. Later versions clarify that the climax occurs on the other side of the Tower, a place called the "Dark Side of the Moon" by the government soldiers and scientist's deployed to meet the aliens. This makes the Dreyfuss-Dillon ascent of the rock field meaningless -- there's no need to climb, you could just walk in the woods around the base of the tower. But, at this point, Spielberg's mise-en-scene is replicating Hitchcock's North by Northwest, an expression that actually occurs in the 1975 film. Spielberg wants to duplicate the famous ending of North by Northwest in which Eva Marie Saint seems to fall off the face (literally) of Mount Rushmore before Cary Grant catches her by the hand and, in a startling cut, pulls her up into the upper bunk on a speeding to train to consummate their romance. So Dreyfuss keeps falling down off the boulders as Melinda Dillon desperately reaches for his hand and, at last, catches it --this is totally gratuitous and, even, a little disconcerting since Dreyfuss is playing a married man and Dillon, soul-mate in obsession, isn't his wife. A number of landscape shots rotating around the column of the magma tower pay homage to the shots of Mount Rushmore that organize the last fifteen minutes of North by Northwest (filmed only fifty miles away from Devil's Tower) and Spielberg repeats an image of an airfield at night, a shot that is central to the climactic scenes in the Hitchcock picture. The actual climax of Close Encounters is largely incoherent: in the final cut, Spielberg shows us a corps of astronauts in bright red suits praying together while a priest calls them "pilgrims" and blesses their journey -- they are apparently volunteers to be taken into outer space by the aliens. There's an elaborate shot of these intrepid volunteers marching toward the Mother Ship but the aliens don't want them -- they are only interested in the invitees, chief of whom is Dreyfuss's character. So after a big and dramatic set-up, the red-suited volunteers (about twenty of them) simply vanish -- they are no longer to be seen in the long shots at the climax. Similarly, everyone puts on sunglasses due to the glare emitted by the enormous solar Mother Ship. But, then, the movie forgets that we were shown, in ostentatious detail, people putting on their dark glasses. The glasses are nowhere visible in a number of the following scenes. Spielberg can't figure out whether his aliens should be tall spindly figures with ET features or little putti -- that is, the amiable 'little greys' who swarm around Dreyfuss in the final shots The film's ending is such a magnificent spectacle of light and sound (the bursts of light, the camera flares, the tuba tones blasting from the mother ship) that audiences were overwhelmed and didn't really notice that the ending of the film is botched -- the shots don't match and the topography is impossible to "read" and the ending is replete with scenes that don't really go anywhere.
At the end of Close Encounters, the Mother Ship like some sort of vast garish flying wedding cake vanishes into outer space. This is the end of the peculiar 1951 flying saucers picture The Day the Earth Stood Still. For some reason, this movie enjoys a good reputation to the extent that it was even remade six or seven years ago. But, the picture isn't very good; it has stiff acting, terrible special effects, and risible dialogue. Furthermore, the movie's premise is a bit sinister. The picture is mostly known for the phrase Klaatu barada Nicktoe, an expression that Patricia Neal (in a debutante role) is required to repeat to the faceless column of metal comprising the robot Gort. (Gort who, like the flying saucer, looks ridiculous is a stolid weaponized mechanical man who fires a laser out of his cyclopean eye-slit to vaporize tanks and rifles in the hands of hostile soldiers.)
Klaatu, the visitor from outers space is a handsome version of Frankenstein's monster: he has a perfectly square head. His head is framed in black hair so heavily greased as to appear like an ebony mirror. Klaatu speaks with a faint accent that you can't quite identify. He's come from Outer Space in his flying saucer (with Gort) as a sort of benign super cop. His message to the world is that you better shape up, stop fighting among yourselves, and renounce violence or the outer space federation will zap the earth into a sooty, charred cinder. (This doesn't make any sense philosophically -- "I want you to forego violence or I will kick the ever-loving shit out of you.") Klaatu gets shot upon embarking from the space ship which causes the uncommunicative Gort to use his laser to melt a bunch of weapons. Klaatu has to be hospitalized after being wounded, although his injuries magically cure themselves within 24 hours. He then escapes from the government hospital where he's being held (not too securely) and goes into DC to rent a room in a boarding house run by the staunchly anti-communist Aunt Bea (from The Andy Griffith Show). There Klaatu encounters a comely widow played by Patricia Neal and her precocious, irritating teenage son, Bobbie. Although Klaatu is supremely weird, Neal's war widow entrusts him to take care of her son for a whole day while she goes on a date with her pompous, overbearing boyfriend. Bobbie takes Klaatu to the Lincoln Memorial where the alien is suitably impressed and says, after reading the Gettysburg Address (about a battle and war heroes, something that should be offensive to Klaatu who is a pacifist when his intergalactic space buddies aren't kicking ass), "these are fine words and "I would like to meet that man." Lincoln, of course, is nowhere to be found, but Bobbie's mother is a secretary for the great astrophysicist Professor Barnhart who is played by Sam Jaffee. Jaffee is ridiculously bad, wearing a fright wig to simulate the appearance of Albert Einstein -- in fact, he looks like an elderly Harpo Marx. Klaatu explains his mission to Barnhart who then convenes a conclave of the world's most brilliant thinkers (all of them male and Caucasian with a few Asian Indians thrown in for a good measure) to receive his message of peace. Meanwhile the dragnet is closing in on Klaatu -- jeeps and tanks and howitzers are deployed to chase him. After some complications, Klaatu, who has been killed but revived, reveals that he's a Deist (a worshipper of the "Almighty") and, then, tells the world's people to make nice or they will be blasted out of existence. On this profoundly dispiriting note, the movie ends, raising the question of whether we, in the audience, will comply with Klaatu's pacifist commands or risk total annihilation. (It's implied that the fractious people of Earth would rather fight among themselves than follow Klaatu's imperious demand.) The idea that peace on earth has to be enforced from beyond the solar system is a bazaar thought-experiment. The picture's strange politics seem to favor the Space-Fascist Klaatu over the humans with whom he interacts. Although the movie has various aspects that connect it to the Red-Scare, it is nonetheless totalitarian in its implications -- an overwhelming exterior force must be applied to human affairs to bring them into compliance with intergalactic norms. This explains the film's Biblical-sounding title: as a demonstration, Klaatu cuts off the electrical power to the whole-world for one-half hour, thereby stranding Patricia Neal in an elevator with the handsome alien for whom she clearly has the hots. This is the sort of movie in which the inept screenwriter coming to the conclusion that the space-fascists should shut off our power as a demonstration of their might and authority, then has someone say: "But the power has not been shut off to airplanes in flight and hospitals", thereby, limiting the disastrous consequences of their intervention in human affairs to the most obvious aspects that immediately come to the audience's mind.
I can't detect any redeeming qualities in the movie -- it is dull: dully written, dully performed, and dully staged.
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