Duel (1971)

Directed by Steven Spielberg; produced by George Eckstein

Somewhere on a highway in southern California, salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver), needing to get to an appointment, passes an old, rusty semi-trailer truck. Little does he know that the action has triggered a grudge in the truck’s driver, who then plays a sadistic contest with Mann, the ultimate aim of which is the salesman’s violent death.

Before the computer-generated graphics of Jurassic Park, before the imaginative light-show of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, even before the mechanical monster of Jaws, Steven Spielberg directed this deceptively simple road-rage version of The Most Dangerous Game, with little more technology than some automobiles, a camera or two, and a long stretch of road. It remains one of his best movies.

Originally a tv-film, Duel demonstrates how good that medium can be – when it wants to be. It helps if the collaboration of writer, director, producer and actor is nearly perfect. It was this film that put Spielberg on the celluloid map. It begins innocently enough, with a grill’s-eye view of the start of Mann’s journey; slowly, it allows the viewer to see him and get to know him. This is never done for the trucker, who remains an unseen force, little differentiated from the behemoth he drives.

This invisibility creates tension, fear and stress throughout the movie, but especially when Mann stops at a roadside diner. He thinks he has out-run the trucker, only to see the vehicle of his nightmare parked outside when he emerges from a restroom. Is one of the other patrons the psycho? That scene, seemingly at odds with the rest of the film, is in fact a hinge. It allows both Mann and the viewer to catch his breath, only to take it away again. And with the guessing game of who the enemy might be, it raises the stakes. There is a clever sequence in which Mann tries to identify the trucker by his boots, which he saw briefly at a filling station. The viewer tries to recall what the boots looked like; no doubt Mann is trying to do the same.

The action on the road is terrific. Superbly, Spielberg manages to make Mann’s predicament claustrophobic. In his car, the lanky salesman seems confined, trapped. He has few resources, and most of them are bettered by the giant truck behind him. There are no gimmicks here: sound is used sparingly (only when a train’s horn startles Mann into thinking his opponent has found him again does its utilization seem common.) Camera-work, angles and editing make the suspense of the script palpable.

The screenplay is by Richard Matheson (author of numerous The Twilight Zone episodes, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”). There is little dialogue, and what there is, is all to the point. The writing is in what happens.

There is no motive imparted to the trucker. We know only what his unfortunate victim knows. The question of why a perpetrator is committing his acts must occur to half the victims of crime in the world; it is a terrifying question, especially when no answer is forthcoming. That’s part of the terror in Duel. Just as frightening is the fact that the trucker sees what he is doing as a game: at one point, Mann tries to solicit help from an elderly couple in an old pick-up. The trucker scares them off; in a movie made today, he would have killed them, but he doesn’t here. This is between him and Mann. In another instance, he helps a stranded school bus, while Mann watches, as if to show his victim that other people will see his killer as perfectly nice.

Mann’s voice-over in a café may seem out of place, but is merely a continuation of the few words he speaks to himself in frustration or astonishment when he is alone. And in these thoughts, the tension is maintained, especially when Mann tries to persuade himself that his ordeal is over.

A scene that was added, purportedly to fill out running time – and, so I gather, disliked for that reason by Spielberg – is actually quite important. In a telephone call to his wife, Mann reveals that, at a party, he did not stand up to a colleague who hit on Mrs Mann. In a Hollywood-world, Stallone or Schwarzenegger would have beaten the masher up; Mann does what many would likely do in real-life: he laughs it off. Regretting this, he nonetheless shows that he is not a brave person, not a warrior. He is ordinary. This adds to the sympathy given him, but also to the realism of his predicament.

The acting is just right. Weaver, who could play heroic, sensible characters, is here someone who is hemmed in by his job, his home, his marriage; one gets the feeling he just wants to coast through life with as little trouble as possible – as many viewers might want. His actions and reactions to the movie’s events are real. Few would not feel his anguish as he pleads with whatever powers control the universe for a little more speed in his car.

The climax gives a fitting final touch to an excellent film, a film which Hitchcock could conceivably have made. And, like another cinematic heavy-weight – Orson Welles - Spielberg’s first feature is one of his best. Fortunately, this director went on to movies that were better – but not by much!

(Readers may be grateful that I didn’t enter into the psychological aspects of Mann versus machine…)