| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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DUEL
Rating: 
USA. 1971.
Director – Steven Spielberg, Screenplay/Based on the Short Story by Richard Matheson, Producer – George Eckstein, Photography – Jack A. Marta, Music – Billy Goldenberg, Art Direction – Robert S. Smith. Production Company – Universal.
Cast:
Dennis Weaver (David Mann)
Plot: Salesman David Mann is on his way to a business meeting when he goes to pass a truck on the road. But the truck driver takes objection to this and proceeds to block the road whenever Mann tries to pass and then causes him to nearly crash into an oncoming car. This escalates into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the truck relentlessly harassing, playing hide’n’seek with and trying to kill Mann.
This remarkable little film heralded the arrival on the scene of a tenderfoot new director by the name of Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg had, by his own account, gotten a job at Universal in the late 1960s simply by dressing up in a suit, walking in through the gates and taking over an uninhabited office. (Try and imagine someone getting away with that today. Although there have been some voices in recent years disputing the truth of this story). From there, Spielberg had managed to get jobs directing episodes of various tv series – The Name of the Game (1968-71), Night Gallery (1969-73), Marcus Welby M.D. (1969-76) and the Columbo tv movies – and then went onto make this tv movie. Even back then the Spielberg name was wowing people. And the success of Duel on the small-screen proved so great it was expanded slightly and released to cinemas outside of the US in 1972.
Duel was based on a 1971 short story published in Playboy by noted genre novelist and screenwriter Richard Matheson, who also wrote The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and most of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films among a whole host of others. (Richard Matheson claims the story was inspired by a road rage incident that happened shortly after he had just heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot).
Before he started rediscovering his childhood, Steven Spielberg made some very good and muchly underrated films, which easily stand up with the very best of his popular oeuvre. Duel and Jaws (1975) were horror shows. In either film Spielberg introduces a non-human antagonist that symbolically emerges out of the blue and smashes through the placid lives of his everyman protagonists. In these early films Spielberg demonstrated a great ability to underscore his flights of fancy with the wittily banal. The opening here is a marvelous picture of normality with its overlaid point-of-view shots as Dennis Weaver leaves Los Angeles, accompanied by snippets of radio talkback voices on the soundtrack banally nattering on about everything from the percussive use of meat to a man concerned about how his being a house-husband bluntens his role as the head of the house. Like every good horror film, this is a picture of normality just waiting for the inexplicable to turn it on its head ...
And when the assaults of the truck do emerge, Spielberg manages to wind Duel up to a level of tension that becomes almost unbearable. Like the moment the truck turns around and charges down on Dennis Weaver as he is fragilely sheltered in a phone-booth trying to call the police or where it starts bearing down behind and slamming into Weaver’s car in a 100 mph race, even just the sinister images as the truck waits on the side of the road or at the end of a tunnel. There’s one scene in a truckstop diner that is a masterful evocation of paranoia, with Dennis Weaver emerging from the men’s room to find the truck parked outside and then, accompanied by his feeble internal monologue, starts trying to work out the identity of the driver, imagining himself challenging one of the men in the cafe to a fight before, in a moment of exquisite black irony, the man he believes is the driver departs in a pickup truck.
The entire film comes with some often stunning camerawork. Spielberg and Jack A. Marta really get in there transforming the dust and oil begrimed, pollution-belching shape of the truck into something primal. The truck is first seen in a tire-level camera cruise that travels right down its length at wheel-level and subsequently sits under its slowly churning central axle or racing alongside its vibrating tires. Spielberg and Jack Marta generate such a sense of presence that a wheel waiting across the road, a puffing smoke stack, or the baleful omniscience of the truck’s giant grille and headlights filling a rear-vision mirror or a back window, are eventually enough to convey the personality of the truck in themselves without seeing the whole.
The fact that the driver is never identified is significant. Some cinema reference works have been happy to pigeonhole Duel as an sf film – the fact that the truck’s driver is rarely seen making for an obvious man-vs-machine allegory. But this seems to be missing the point. In seeing Duel, this becomes a difficult case to maintain – the driver is seen clearly silhouetted in the cab, his beckoning arm a couple of times, and at the climax the camera for the first time joins him in the cab in two almost subliminal shots, one of him changing gears, the others of his hands holding the wheel. Certainly the Man vs Machine analogy rears up over the film, but it is only a metaphor, and Duel reads as a standard psychological thriller in every other way. Although it is a metaphor Richard Matheson is not unaware of, his deliberate choice of character name makes the film quite literally about Man(n) vs Machine. And by the end with the truck going over the cliff in slow-motion accompanied by a bestial roar and Dennis Weaver’s eventual reduction to non-verbal grunts as he conducts a dance of triumph, Spielberg and Richard Matheson have symbolically stripped Mann to the point he is caveman fighting a primitive leviathan. But the presence of the driver and particularly the scene in the diner where Dennis Weaver is trying to guess the identity of the driver in the diner show that Duel is not really an sf film, and to call it an sf film is to treat the metaphor in a deadeningly literal way. If anything Duel has a lineage to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) in that it is a film of existential Out of the Blue horrors, films where the respective directors withhold any explanation for the grueling assaults their protagonists are undergoing and where the very lack of an explanation for the reasons behind the assault creates a sense of overwhelming anxiety.
Some scenes were added to Duel to bump up the running time for cinematic release, namely the brief phone-call to Dennis Weaver’s wife and the school bus sequence. These scenes don’t add a great deal, particularly the school bus one, which takes an unnecessary lightness, although this is only a very minor quibble in an otherwise superb film.
A number of films owe a debt to Duel. The likes of the blatantly imitative tv movie Killdozer (1974) and other films such as The Car (1977), Christine (1983) and the tv movie Wheels of Terror (1990) take up the notion of malevolent, frequently possessed, vehicles. Other films such as the equally excellent The Hitcher (1986), Jeepers Creepers (2001) and Joy Ride/Road Kill (2001) mimic the tense psychological road games. Later, in a move that infuriated Spielberg, an episode of the tv series The Incredible Hulk (1977-81) entitled Never Give a Trucker an Even Break, rehashed substantial amounts of stock footage from Duel in a story where Bill Bixby aids a woman trying to get her father’s truck back from hijackers. Amazingly the episode manages to completely reverse the nature of the truck here where in the episode the truck is in fact being driven by the heroes of the show. Duel was also amusingly spoofed in a tv commercial for German car-manufacturer Audi.
Steven Spielberg’s subsequent genre films as director are:– Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Always (1989), Hook (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), A.I. (2001), Minority Report (2002), War of the Worlds (2005) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Spielberg has also acted as executive producer on numerous films.
Richard Matheson’s other genre works are:- The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) based on his own novel, Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963), the Jules Verne adaptation Master of the World (1961), the occult film Night of the Eagle/Burn, Witch, Burn (1961), the Corman-produced mortician’s comedy The Comedy of Terrors (1963), The Last Man on Earth (1964) based on his novel I Am Legend concerning a world taken over by vampires, the Hammer psycho-thriller The Fanatic/Die, Die, My Darling (1965), the classic Hammer occult film The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), the historical biopic De Sade (1969), The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973) tv movies, the ghost story The Legend of Hell House (1973), the tv adaptation of Dracula (1974), the tv movies Scream of the Wolf (1974), The Stranger Within (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975), Dead of Night (1977), The Strange Possession of Mrs Oliver (1977), the tv adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1980), the time travel romance Somewhere in Time (1980) from his own novel, Jaws 3-D (1983) and Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983). Works based on his novels are The Omega Man (1971) from I Am Legend, the afterlife fantasy What Dreams May Come (1998), the fine ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999) and I Am Legend (2007).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1991
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