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Raiders of the Ugly Duckling

This article is more than 41 years old

Steven Spielberg's great strength as a movie-maker is not just that he's an expert at his chosen craft, but that he seems near enough to his audiences to have a natural contact with their emotions. This doesn't make him a heavyweight, but it is a priceless gift to offer the cinema today when going to a movie has become less and less of a corporate experience, if only because there aren't usually too many there. E.T. (Empire, U) thus comes to a beleaguered industry like a gift from the gods. Not only does it get bums on seats but it encourages the kind of shared enjoyment that suggests the cinema still has something unique to offer.

It could be, of course, that the widescale video pirating operation, encouraged by the lengthy period between E.T.'s American and British premieres, will stop tens of thousands of people watching it where it was intended to be watched. To those, I can only say that you've seen only half of its attraction. E.T. is a superlative piece of popular cinema that positively requires sharing with an audience. Its photography and sound-track, part and parcel of this appeal, need a big screen and stereo speakers. The way it gets at you is the way of the cinema.

Yet to analyse it beyond that fact is intensely difficult. I said from Edinburgh that it was the perfect Disney film - a simple, direct story culled from a childlike rather than childish imagination and played for all it is worth and possibly more. Its central idea is that suggested by Close Encounters, that if there are other beings from outer space they are as likely to be friendly as hostile. And on this thesis is balanced the further thought that an alien's vulnerability on earth is likely to be just as great as our vulnerability off it.

Thus we have E.T. himself (if indeed E.T. is a "he") friendly, vulnerable, stranded in suburban California. Now comes the masterstroke. He is looked after by a child, through whose eyes we can share the alien's suspicions of the world, which are amply justified when adult searchers find and kill him through their failure to understand the nature of the bond of love between the two. Love, however, eventually conquers all, and the homesick E.T., now revived, sets off in his summoned spacecraft for his own suburbia in the skies.

Such a tale would have been nice in the hands of any good director, but Spielberg's manipulation of it, and us, is brilliant. The film is full of ideas which seem so obvious afterwards that one wonders why no one else thought of them long ago. Like the moment when the boy's mother, searching for his hidden treasure, opens the toy cupboard and looks straight at a transfixed and terrified E.T. without recognising anything strange.

This sort of moment, which many a more sophisticated director might have eschewed, considering it too easy, produces a reaction in the cinema which has to be experienced to be believed. It is like an old joke told with such perfect timing that it seems completely fresh. E.T., the film, is littered with such episodes, and almost all of them work like a dream. Which, perhaps, is what the film is - a dream of childhood, brilliantly orchestrated to involve not only children but anyone able to remember being one.

What more can one say? That Carlo Rambaldi's E.T. model is the best Ugly Duckling since the Ugly Duckling? That Henry Thomas's 10-year-old Elliott and Robert MacNaughton and Drew Barrymore as his elder brother and younger sister are delightful rather than disgusting examples of Hollywood brat actors? That the middle-class Los Angeles ambiance (Spielberg's own) is expertly pointed? These are added reasons for the film's phenomenal success, together with excellent special effects.

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