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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

Steven Spielberg has made four great movies in the span of his illustrious career: DUEL, JAWS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. You can throw in SCHINDLER'S LIST, but it's got that unbearable 'I could have done more' scene, just as SAVING PRIVATE RYAN has the two cheesy bookend sequences at the cemetery.

The four films mentioned above have no unbearable scenes -- only great ones. They are not self-conscious 'Steven Spielberg Films' with all the expectations that such a movie implies. On the contrary, they were made by the director when he was just starting out, telling the stories he wanted to tell, or, in the case of DUEL and JAWS, proving that he could tell commercial genre stories better than anyone else could.

He was perhaps the first of kind to fully share his own childlike awe at what could happen on a movie screen. For example, when Brody breaks out into a grin as Quint steers the Orca toward the monster shark in JAWS. Or when Indiana Jones works under a positively biblical thunderstorm to uncover the Ark of the Covenant in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Spielberg always manages to infuse the audience with both his delight and wonder at what's happening.

No movie better illustrates Spielberg's power than CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. The movie's story is simple: One night, a lowly power company worker named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) has a close encounter with a UFO. Haunted by the experience, he begins to obsess over what exactly he saw. Slowly but surely, strange impulses unravel his life peaceful in suburbia. Following a series of seemingly mythical images planted inside his mind, he and a woman (Melinda Dillon) whose child was abducted by UFOs travel to a fateful, final encounter with beings from another world.

It sounds like a story from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER, but Spielberg makes CLOSE ENCOUNTERS astonishingly profound and powerful without ever succumbing to pretension. It's ordinary people confronting the mystical questions of the universe, and Spielberg never fails to let us in on every sublime and ridiculous detail such an encounter would create.

Visually, the film still manages to take your breath away. Spielberg, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and special effects ace Doug Trumbull show audiences the lambent beauty of an alien spacecraft bathed in light, as well as Earth's magical nighttime world of twinkling blue stars, dusky horizons and curling, inky clouds hovering over ordinary tract houses. It's the night we all remember from when we were children -- an alien world that came to life every 24 hours. A time in which we feared and hoped that anything might happen -- that something we had never experienced before was waiting just out of sight in the darkness.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS has finally made it to DVD and not a minute too soon. In the years since its 1977 release, genre fans have had to endure all manner of rip-offs and 'homages' starring adorable Pillsbury Doughboy aliens and floating chandeliers -- enough to make anyone question whether unleashing CE3K on the public was ever really a good idea. After all, it gave us MAC AND ME and COCOON 2: THE RETURN. But don't blame those hideous copycats on Spielberg. When CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and STAR WARS debuted in the same year, they were the mavericks -- the films that broke decades of Hollywood tradition. Now, Lucas (and to a lesser extent, Spielberg) are part of the establishment, cranking out sequels and 'event films' like sausages. In 1977, however, those movies were something special.

Laurent Bouzereau's documentary on the CE3K DVD offers an edifying glimpse into the making of the movie. At one hour and 45 minutes, you can hardly complain that anything was left out. All of the film's living cast members are on hand to offer up their memories, but of particular interest are the technical comments from Trumbull, artist Ralph McQuarrie, production designer Joe Alves, model builder Greg Jein (who shows his first, tiny maquette of the film's famous mothership) and animation artist Robert Swarthe. Also on hand is John Williams, who humbly discusses the development of one of the most staggeringly powerful film scores ever written. Spielberg is equally entertaining, although mentioning writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins (who did uncredited work on the screenplays for both CE3K and STAR WARS) would have been nice.

The disc includes 11 deleted scenes -- some of which are redundant and some of which add interesting story points. Of course, there is no commentary, which makes me wonder why a second disc was actually needed disc one contains the movie only, with various sound options. The animated menus are nothing to get excited about (and I know it's fun to demonstrate these, but after you've seen one you've seen 'em all) and only act to slow down the menu scanning process and force more useful extras off the disc.

The picture quality is good, although the night sequences lack the brilliant luster they once had. Part of this, no doubt, is due to simple compression. But it's a shame to see some of the most spellbinding nocturnal cinematography ever accomplished reduced to DVD imagery that is just 'pretty good.' The transfer is reportedly the same as the laserdisc released a few years ago, although it is anamorphic I wouldn't be surprised if we see a remastered 'special' special edition of CE3K somewhere down the road. Ultimately, viewing a letterboxed CLOSE ENCOUNTERS on a 32-inch television set will never recapture the thrill of seeing a 70mm print for the first time in the dark of a movie theater (something I actually got to do last year). But if you turn off all the lights, you just might manage to catch a glimpse of that sensation.