Over the next four years he made about fifteen story films. Old enough now to be allowed to see almost anything at his local cinema, the Kiva, he plundered Hollywood for ideas. Some of the lessons of The Great Locomotive Chase, Disney’s version of the Civil War raid on which Buster Keaton had based his classic 1926 comedy The General, were put into effect in Duel, and parts of Henry Levin’s version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth would be restaged for Raiders of the Lost Ark. One of the first films he saw which was not straight escapism was The Searchers. John Ford’s story of racist loner John Wayne searching for the niece kidnapped by Indians opened his eyes to the poetic possibilities of landscape. ‘I wasn’t raised in a big city,’ Spielberg says. ‘I lived under the sky all through those formative years, from third grade right through high school. That’s my knowledge of a sort of lifestyle.’ Ford, brought up on the imagery of Catholic paintings and ‘holy pictures’, instinctively employed aspects of the natural world as metaphors for mental and moral states. Dust represented dissolution; rivers a sense of peace and cleansing; silhouettes presaged death. Certain landscapes, like Monument Valley, were for him intellectual universes in miniature. Those weathered towers of limestone rising from the desert against a vast sky became the unalterable precepts by which honourable men must live. Spielberg would make his own pilgrimage to them in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, one of many films to exhibit a Fordian vision of the American west.
Frank Capra also returned to the screen in 1959 after eight years in the wilderness to direct A Hole in the Head, though neither it, nor the film that followed, A Pocketful of Miracles, a remake of his 1933 Lady for a Day, in which sentimental gangsters transform an impoverished street-corner apple seller into a socialite so that her daughter can make an advantageous marriage, rivalled Mr Deeds Goes to Town or Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
While his future colleagues in the New Hollywood like Brian De Palma were surrendering to the moral intricacies and multiple deceptions of Alfred Hitchcock or, in the case of Martin Scorsese, relishing the social disquiet behind Sam Fuller’s tabloid cinema and the pastel melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray, Spielberg made Ford and Capra his models. Lacking a strong moral structure of his own, he absorbed theirs, populist, sentimental, reverent and patriotic. Never comfortable talking to actors, he adopted their technique too, employing landscape and weather as symbols of character, and developing a fluid camera style and skill in directing masses of people that swept his audiences past fragile narratives and sketchy characters. ‘Film for me is totally pictorial,’ he says. ‘I’m more attracted to doing things with pictures and atmospheres – the idea of the visual telling the story.’
In this state of mind, Spielberg also dabbled in theatre:
I was probably the only student director at Arcadia High School in Arizona who was allowed to control and put together a show. I did Guys and Dolls and brought the action, especially the brawl in the Hot Box, into the audience. I guess that’s kind of commonplace in today’s theatre, but then it was very strange to have people running up and down the aisles singing and acting. I got killed for it! Every critic in Arizona who could write said, ‘How dare he open up the proscenium and do this drivel in the audience. Guys and Dolls is meant to be on stage.’ I did the standards – Arsenic and Old Lace, I Remember Mama – everything you were allowed to do then.
Like many directors destined to work in sf and fantasy, Spielberg discovered the quirky magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Edited by Forrest J Ackerman, self-styled ‘Mr Sci Fi’, whose Los Angeles home contained the world’s largest collection of sf movie memorabilia, it celebrated horror film and its techniques with jocular reverence.
The wave of cheap science fiction films that was Hollywood’s response to the sf publishing boom washed through American cinemas throughout 1959 and 1960. Spielberg was banned from seeing the 1958 I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a relatively modest and reticent film despite its gaudy title, but went anyway, and was racked by nightmares. In particular he came to admire the work of Jack Arnold, who directed The Incredible Shrinking Man, It Came from Outer Space, The Space Children and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The catchpenny titles disguised thoughtful exercises in imagination and suspense which made evocative use of natural surroundings and domestic interiors. The shrinking man in Richard Matheson’s story, exposed to fallout from an atomic test, dwindles away in an ordinary suburban home; the film’s menaces are a cat and a spider. In It Came from Outer Space, written by Ray Bradbury, aliens arrive outside a small desert township. The man who first makes contact with them, John Putnam, is an archetypal Spielberg character, an unassuming Jeffersonian natural philosopher and amateur astronomer who muses about the nature of the universe and the desert, to both of which he has a gently mystical attitude.
Spielberg shared the general enthusiasm for The Thing (from Another World), a rare example of a major director, Howard Hawks, dealing with an sf subject. The script also had an important pedigree. It was based on a story called ‘Who Goes There?’ written by John W. Campbell before he became editor of Analog. Like most of Campbell’s work, it is refreshingly iconoclastic. A crashed alien ravages an Arctic research station, smashing down the scientist who tries to befriend it. It’s left to a few tough professional airmen to kill it off and save the world. At the end, a reporter broadcasts the story, warning his listeners, ‘Watch the skies. Keep watching the skies.’
For all the film’s flair, however, Hawks’s right-wing paranoia always jarred. It’s to Arnold’s films (and Bradbury’s script for Outer Space) that much of Spielberg’s later work is traceable. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released, Spielberg asked Bradbury, ‘Well, how did you like your film?’ and explained he’d been inspired by It Came from Outer Space. Bradbury and Arnold’s idea, that alien visitors may be benign, and concerned mainly to return home as quickly and quietly as possible, would surface in both Close Encounters and E.T. The fathers of the ‘space children’ who discover an alien in a beachside Californian cave work on a nearby scientific project and share the dislocated life Spielberg knew well, and which he evoked in The Goonies. And while the Black Lagoon may only have been in a corner of the Universal backlot lake, the underwater footage shot in the crystal springs of a Florida park played so effectively on the sense of ‘something’ lurking below us where we swim that the aquaphobic Spielberg paid it homage in the opening scenes of Jaws.
From the start, it wasn’t the atmosphere of fantasy films Spielberg enjoyed so much as their depiction of alternative realities through model work, special effects and elaborate make-up. His sisters, resented because of the attention they drew from his mother, and thus away from him, became victims of his exercises in imagination. He would scare them by building his face into a horror mask with papier mâché made from wet green toilet paper, or would lurk outside the window of Anne, the youngest, and groan ‘I am the moooooon’ until she became hysterical. He convinced them that the bedroom closet hid the decomposing body of a World War II airman, then left it to their curiosity to peek in at the plastic skull he’d hidden there, with goggles over the eyes and a flashlight inside. After they had been terrified by William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars, which featured the disembodied head of the Martian super-mind, played by an actress with green-painted face, fringed with tentacles, in a glass bubble, he locked them in the closet, this time with an empty fishbowl within which, he said, the head would materialise. All these domestic horrors and more would be recycled in Poltergeist.
War films could be just as interesting as science fiction, providing there were elaborate uniforms, and plenty of buildings were blown up. Firms like Castle Films sold World War II documentaries on 8mm, and Spielberg used some of these as stock footage for a flying story called Fighter Squadron. Arnold persuaded