No, but I Saw the Rough Cut

By RICHARD CORLISS

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND: THE SPECIAL EDITION

Directed and Written by Steven Spielberg

Hot young Director Ace Tyro has toiled for three years to complete his widescreen, R-rated indictment of major league baseball, All That Yaz. Its original running time: 135 minutes. But Tyro decides to cut five minutes for the premiere, and another five minutes after the first week of its release. He adds 20 minutes for the European version. For airplane showings the movie is softened to get a PG rating and cut to two hours flat; the airline projectors can hold only that much film.

Yaz is sold to a cable system, which airs the 125-minute version, and then to a commercial network, which gives the film a new title (The Umpire Strikes Out). To fit a two-hour prime-time slot, the network cuts it to 97 minutes. Later, another network restores much of the footage, including half an hour of outtakes, minus the locker-room sex scene. Finally, 16mm prints are rented to film societies and revival houses, but in a TV-shaped format and with yet another title: La Cage aux Fouls.

Look at a painting, listen to a record, read a novel or even a movie review, and you are in the presence of something immutable--a work of art or craft that has achieved its definitive form. In theory, film should be the same: an art machine as permanent as bronze replicas of a Degas dancer, as popular as the Model T Ford. In fact, film has become a most pliable plastic art. A wily producer, a finicky censor, even a TV executive can alter or destroy the film's shape, texture and meaning. Now the directors are playing at cinema surgery: Steven Spielberg has just issued a "special edition" of his 1977 hit, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As one film critic observes: "People used to ask me if I'd seen a certain movie. Now they ask which version I've seen."

Ever since their flickering beginnings, movies have been fair game for the scissors and splicer. In 1903 the distributors of The Great Train Robbery advised nickelodeons that a startling shot of a gunman firing directly at the audience could be inserted at either the beginning or the end of the film. D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance (1916), which blended parables from four epochs into a "film fugue," bombed at the box office; so Griffith extracted and recut two of the stories and released them as separate films. Too soon, producers were applying the cleaver of their judgment to good films and bad, all in the name of "giving the public what it wants." The public, it was implied, did not want to see the complete, two-hour version of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons--so 43 minutes were cut, never to be seen again.

In many cases, the unkindest cuts of movie moguls have been restored decades later by heroic film scholars. Together again for the first time: King Kong, in which the great ape engages in vigorous foreplay with Fay Wray; Welles' Macbeth and Touch of Evil; Max Ophuls' magnificent melodrama Lola Monies; and Sergio Leone's great homage to John Ford, Once Upon a Time in the West.

Indeed, at times, restorers get carried away with their noble task. Akira Kurosawa is amused by the diligence of historians who assemble the complete Japanese versions of films that the director wanted Western audiences to see in a shorter, faster-paced form. He is now at work streamlining his latest film, The Shadow Warrior, in consultation with his executive producers: Francis Coppola and George Lucas.

They are a good choice for chopping. As Young Turks rising to the status of Hollywood pashas, they upset many of the old rules--including the precept that a finished film really is finished. Coppola sutured his two Godfather films, along with an hour of outtakes, into a four-night NBC extravaganza, and last year he previewed several versions of Apocalypse Now before deciding which one he wanted--for now. Lucas rereleased American Graffiti with additional footage. Still, Coppola and Lucas are hardly the only directors to have joined the emerging slice-and-splice school: Stanley Kubrick cut 19 minutes from 2001: A Space Odyssey a week after its release in 1968, and three minutes from The Shining after its opening this May. Robert Altman planned an eight-hour Nashville saga for ABC, and Martin Scorsese hoped to restore many of the sequences cut from New York, New York for telecast on NBC; so far, neither dream has been fulfilled. Bernardo Bertolucci is a compulsive tinkerer. After the release of Last Tango in Paris, Critic Pauline Kael complained to him that one of the best paragraphs in her review described a sequence that Bertolucci had cut.

Steven Spielberg, child and master of the movie machine, is another film maker who shows an itch to play Silly Putty with finished work. His first TV feature, Duel, was released in a longer version for theaters in Europe. Last year when ABC aired Jaws, Spielberg added a few scenes cut from the original print. Now he has reworked Close Encounters, deleting 25 minutes from the original print and incorporating 20 minutes of outtakes and new footage. The result: the "new" Close Encounters is different--and the same.

The plot has remained. Repairman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is struck, like Saul of Tarsus, with a vision of alien benignity; together with Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), whose small son has run away from home to hitch a ride on a starship, Roy brazens his way into the first meeting of man and extraterrestrial. Both film versions pay heartfelt homage to the spirit of early Disney--not only in their use of the song When You Wish Upon a Star (from Pinocchio) but also in their insistence on a childlike belief in the magic of movies. The actors here are the audience: they spend most of the film watching and listening to the lovely sights and sounds that Spielberg and his special-effects team have put together. Spielberg in effect is the alien who steps from the mother ship at the end of the film. He is shy and cute, smart and wise. He smiles and waves.

By contrast, Speilberg has telescoped the film's middle section, which describes Roy's ascent, through madness, to the space traveler's wave length--his alienation. Instead of inching away from his baffled family into the cocoon of his tran scendence, Roy breaks with them in an abrasively strong scene, a kind of group tantrum. At the end, Roy enters the starship, and this time the audience goes with him--for a brief survey of the ship's angelic multiterraced interior. Roy grins beatifically; the wooden husband has turned into a real boy. Pinocchio lives.

A sage once wrote that "life is a continual becoming." That is the message of Close Encounters--both kinds--and of the film-making tendency to take well-enough and try to make it better. The old Hollywood machine has become a malleable organism, as the new directors claim the right to restage their films the way George Balanchine keeps reshaping his ballets. Moviegoers are advised to join in the collaborative process. Shall we dance? --By Richard Corliss

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