Old school Spielberg

Once when I was a child, my parents gave me Neil Sinyard's "The Films of Steven Spielberg" for my birthday. At first I looked only at the pictures, particularly those images from Spielberg's big movies: "E.T.", the "Indiana Jones" movies, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and so on. I chose to ignore his early movies on account of the practical reason that my local video store did not have them in stock, so why bother? Hence I have not joined Goldie Hawn on the "Sugarland Express" and I still haven't seen Spielberg's take on Columbo.

The early Spielberg movie that would garner the most attention and acclaim over the years would be the thriller "Duel" (1971), a simple cat-and-mouse story based on a Richard Matheson ("I Am Legend") short story published in Playboy.

The impotent protagonist

Filmed as a low budget "movie of the weekend" for the American TV channel ABC - Spielberg was not yet to be trusted with expensive studio fare - the film uses its budgetary limitations to its advantage in pitting a mild-mannered city dweller David Mann (Dennis Weaver) against a malicious (and never seen) truck driver on the open country road, stripping the film of distracting subplots and secondary characters that take up much screen time. We are so aligned with Mann that we are privy to his thoughts as he reflects on his predicament, making it clear that he in his Plymouth really is no much for a redneck in a massive truck. Weaver is completely believable as the panicking Mann (in an interview, Matheson concedes his naming the character Mann as representative of 'man' was "foolish") and clearly anticipates Kurt Russell's Jeff Taylor in "Breakdown" (Mostow 1996) twenty five years later. ("Breakdown", by the way, is one of the 1990's most deserving B-movies and remains worth a watch.)

"Duel" starts with the point-of-view of a car gradually exchanging the city's congested roads for the easy driving of the country. Mann is on a business trip, and we learn that he and his wife had had a falling out the night before which had not been resolved. His telephone conversation with his wife, where we are shown not only the wife but also the couple's children, is the film's most misguided creative choice - why does Spielberg insist on locating Mann in a nuclear family while the character would have been just as convincing without this character baggage? Mann encounters the truck early on as it hinders his way, overtakes it, and in so doing incurs the wrath of whoever drives the truck. The rest of the film consists of Mann being hunted by the truck, with the truck showing up every now and again just as the tension threatens to ebb.

While the film relies too much on musical cues to announce objects and themes (a shrill twiiiiing! when the truck appears around the corner, with some sounds indicating a debt to Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann), the camera and editing become fittingly frenzied as the film builds up to the inevitable final showdown. ("Duel" is maybe not an accurate title for the film, as Mann is dominated by the truck 99% of the time.) The film is good at demonstrating Mann's fear, as in scenes where Mann finds himself taking a break after a dangerous showdown in a roadside diner. Boxed in by the diner's pink interiors, Mann is shown as positively petrified. Another scene is illustrative of Spielberg's command of tension: Mann is waved down by a bus driver. The bus overheated and now needs a push to get going again. The bus is transporting school children, and the kids are playing on Mann's car and the roadside. We know that it's a matter of time before the truck reappears, and what happens then?

[A digression: in John Carpenter's superb "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976), which is another significant American film from the revolutionary 1970s, a gang member shoots and kills a young girl eating an ice cream. It happens on camera, and comes as such a surprise to someone fed on a diet of safe American filmmaking that you replay the scene just to check that it actually happened. For a second I pondered the possibilities of carnage in the school bus scene, but Spielberg is always protecting children; even if he puts them in harm's way himself, things always work out fine for them.]

I wanted to embed the "Duel" trailer below, but it makes the film look lightweight and absurd and gives far too many of the film's best scenes away.

"Duel" is a road movie thriller that puts similar films (see "Joyride") to shame by showing these more recent, road rage-era incarnations as self-indulgent. I much prefer this film to another famous film about the dangers of having trucks on roads, "The Wages of Fear" (Clouzot 1953).