Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind arrived in 1977 as a science fiction drama with a tagline that promised the cosmos and a running time of 137 minutes. It stars Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, an electrical lineman in Indiana, and François Truffaut as Claude Lacombe, a French government scientist. The film’s title comes from astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek’s classification of encounters, in which the third kind means human observation of extraterrestrials or “animate beings.” That is the whole engine of the picture: not invasion, not war, but looking.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Roy Neary and the Shape in His Head
The film opens with discovery. Lacombe and his interpreter and cartographer David Laughlin, played by Bob Balaban, examine Flight 19 — the Navy aircraft that vanished over the Bermuda Triangle in 1945 — found immaculate and abandoned in the Sonoran Desert. They later learn the SS Cotopaxi has turned up abandoned in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Near Indianapolis, two airplanes narrowly avoid a mid-air collision with a UFO.
Then the story narrows to a man. Widespread power outages force Roy Neary out to investigate, and en route he has his close encounter. The UFO passes over his truck and lightly burns the side of his face with its lights. It takes off with three others. Roy and police officers chase them by road and fail.
What follows is the part that matters. Roy becomes obsessed with a subliminal image of a mountainous shape, and he builds models of it again and again. He brings dirt, bricks and other debris into his home to sculpt a large replica. His wife Ronnie, played by Teri Garr, leaves with their three children. His friends and neighbors ostracize him.
This is a performance of a man being unmade by something he cannot name. Dreyfuss had campaigned hard for the role. “I launched myself into a campaign to get the part,” he said. “I would walk by Steve’s office and say stuff like ‘Al Pacino has no sense of humor’ or ‘Jack Nicholson is too crazy’. I eventually convinced him to cast me.”
Spielberg’s own account is blunter: “Dreyfuss talked me into casting him. He listened to about 155 days’ worth of Close Encounters. He even contributed ideas.”
Jillian Guiler and the Boy in the House
Melinda Dillon plays Jillian Guiler, a single mother whose three-year-old son Barry, played by Cary Guffey, is abducted during the same UFO manifestation. The film gives her the mirror of Roy’s story. She begins compulsively sketching the same mountain he cannot stop building.
Before that, she is terrorized in her home by a UFO descending from the clouds. She fights off aggressive attempts by unseen beings to enter. In the chaos, Barry is taken.
Dillon was cast three days before shooting, on a suggestion from Hal Ashby, who had worked with her on Bound for Glory. Garr had wanted the part of Jillian and was cast as Ronnie instead. Meryl Streep and Amy Irving also auditioned for Ronnie.
The pairing of Roy and Jillian is the film’s quiet structural idea. Two strangers in Indiana, one man and one mother, are handed the same picture in their heads and no way to explain it. Their obsession is not a flaw. It is the only sane response to something the rest of the world refuses to see.
Claude Lacombe and the Scientist Who Listens
Casting Truffaut as Lacombe remains one of the strangest and best decisions in mainstream science fiction. The internationally renowned director had never acted in a film he did not direct, and Close Encounters is his only role in an English-language film. The real-life model for Lacombe was UFO expert Jacques Vallée. Gérard Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Lino Ventura were all considered.
Truffaut used his free time on set to write the script for The Man Who Loved Women. He also worked on a novel, The Actor, which he abandoned.
Lacombe is not a soldier and not a debunker. He pursues a link between unexplained scientific phenomena across the globe, and he treats the phenomenon as something to understand rather than something to shoot. That choice sets the film’s entire moral temperature. The military machinery is present — J. Patrick McNamara as Project Leader, Warren J. Kemmerling as Wild Bill, Phil Dodds as ARP Musician — but the movie’s loyalty sits with the people taking notes.
The Mountain, Built Out of Dirt
The script went through more hands than the sole credit suggests. Spielberg received sole credit for the screenplay, but Paul Schrader, John Hill, David Giler, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins and Jerry Belson all contributed in varying degrees. The project had been a long-cherished one. In late 1973, Spielberg developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science-fiction film.
Douglas Trumbull served as visual effects supervisor. Carlo Rambaldi designed the aliens. The production budget was US$19.4 million, and the film was released in a limited number of cities on November 16 and 23, 1977.
The casting history is its own document of the era. Steve McQueen was Spielberg’s first choice for Roy Neary. McQueen was impressed with the script but said he was not right for the role because he was unable to cry on cue. James Caan, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Gene Hackman turned it down. Robert De Niro was considered. Jack Nicholson declined because of scheduling conflicts.
Every one of those names is a movie star of a certain kind — the kind who wins by force. Close Encounters does not need that. It needs a man who can be broken open by wonder, and Dreyfuss plays that note without a shred of vanity.
What the Film Refuses to Do
The title is derived from astronomer and Ufologist J. Allen Hynek’s classification of close encounters with extraterrestrials, in which the third kind denotes human observations of extraterrestrials or “animate beings”.
That definition is the film’s thesis. The third kind is not contact as conquest. It is contact as witness. Spielberg builds 137 minutes around people who see something and cannot put it down, and he refuses to hand the audience the comfort of an enemy.
The genre in 1977 was not short on hostile visitors. Close Encounters went the other way, and it did so with a straight face. The UFOs burn Roy’s cheek and abduct a child, so the film is not naive about the cost. But it never turns the visitors into a threat to be defeated. The scientists, the lineman and the mother are all reaching for the same thing.
The middle section is where the film takes its biggest risk. Roy’s decline is not glamorous. He loses his wife, his children and his standing with his neighbors, and the movie does not rescue him from that. It treats the loss as the price of having seen clearly. That is a harder and more honest position than most science fiction of the period was willing to take.
A Score of 9.0
Close Encounters of the Third Kind earns its place on the strength of three things: a premise that treats first contact as an act of observation rather than combat, a lead performance that makes obsession legible instead of merely strange, and a visual effects effort under Trumbull that has aged better than most of its contemporaries.
The weaknesses are real but secondary. At 137 minutes, the film’s middle stretch spends a long time watching Roy alienate everyone around him, and the repetition of the mountain image can start to feel like a loop rather than a build. Truffaut’s Lacombe is a wonderful presence but a thin character, more a point of view than a person. The screenplay’s many contributors show in a few tonal seams.
None of that touches the core. Close Encounters is a film about the moment a person realizes the universe is larger than the life they built, and it commits to that moment completely. The published critical score stands at 9.0 out of 10, and it is deserved. This is one of the defining American science fiction films of its decade.
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