Available for rent ($2.99) or purchase ($8.99) through various sites.
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Dennis Weaver
Duel is a (very) simple tale of terror. David, a nebbish businessman from SoCal, has to drive through the desert to make a business meeting. On the highway, he encounters this Goliath of a truck, emblazoned with the word “FLAMMABLE”, just barely visible through all the muck. You assume the muck is oil and rust, but you also wonder if there’s some blood in there as well. After an initial bout of road rage where David shows just a hint of aggression – albeit less than the faceless driver – the titular battle is ON.
The rest of the film is this cat-and-mouse game. The truck – itself the villain because David can’t get a good look at the driver – toys with him. Out on the open road, it chases him down. When he lets the truck pass, it waits for him to catch up. It’s sadistic, and it wears on both David’s and our nerves. A film set in the wide open expanse of the California desert is somehow made to be suffocating and claustrophobic.
The first feature film by Steven Spielberg began as a made-for-TV movie before its popularity earned it an expanded run-time and an international release. Not bad for a movie shot on location in less than 2 weeks (watch this movie with THAT fact in your mind, and it shall be blown). It’s not hard to see why it was such a hit, though. Everything that would make Spielberg a great was on display in Duel.
Spielberg is a master technician, more than anything. And it’s all on display here. The camerawork is excellent, with far-away zooms and carefully staged shots adding to the suspense. David, in a moment of inner dialogue, likens his situation to being thrown back into the jungle; it’s no coincidence when the score juxtaposes this American west with African instruments, making for a tribal, eerie sensation at times. The sound is even a major character here, where the faint purr of a distant diesel engine is enough to heighten your sense of alarm. And the stunt driving… it is unsurprisingly perfectly shot, done in a way where you can sense the danger – this film quite obviously wasn’t shot on a soundstage. The director would refine all this much later in his career, and several future works seem like direct descendants of Duel – after all, it’s basically a proto-Jaws when you really think about its core elements: man must survive a hulking, monstrous, unfathomably relentless terror with no help for miles.
That’s not to say David doesn’t encounter any other people. There are set pieces all along this road, but the roadside locals or other drivers all wind up unhelpful in various ways, just mirages of hope in a desert of desolation.
Spielberg, due to his predilection for popcorn films, sometimes doesn’t really get proper respect from cinephiles, I think. He is seen as a director for the masses, and thematically his films are often ambiguous or uninterested. The same arguments were levied against Alfred Hitchcock, and I find both arguments unconvincing. It’s fitting, then, that Spielberg delivered as fine a tribute to the Master of Suspense as any. There’s a diner scene whose tension seems ripped directly from a Hitchcock film. It’s a 10 minute masterpiece on its own, with an ending that tells viewers, “no, this isn’t going to be that easy”. We don’t get to pull back the curtain. We don’t get to understand any side of the shark that made it a ruthless killing machine. All we have time to do is survive.
Is it Watchlist-worthy? Yes!