Director Report Card: Steven Spielberg (1971)

2. Duel

Following his successful work on the “Night Gallery" pilot, Steven Spielberg continued to humbly practice his craft for Universal’s television sector. He directed another "Night Gallery" segment, an episode of "Marcus Welby, M.D.," the series premier of "Colombo," and installments of forgotten programs like "The Psychiatrist," "The Name of the Game," and "Owen Marshall, Councilor at Law." Around that time is when Spielberg's secretary read the Richard Matheson short story, "Duel." Universal was making the story into a TV Movie of the Week and Spielberg quickly realized it was ideal material for him. With a script from Matheson himself – who always envisioned the story as a television episode anyway – “Duel" quickly went in front of cameras. The film would debut on ABC on November 20th, 1971 to rave reviews, effectively launching its director's career as we know it. 

David Mann is a simple salesman, on a long road trip back home. As he crosses the vast, empty Mojave Desert, he finds himself behind a massive, rickety-looking tanker truck. Passing the vehicle, the truck then passes Mann. Aggravated, he cuts the other driver off. And that's the beginning of a day-long nightmare for David Mann. The truck continues to antagonize and torment him along the dusty, lonely highway. After the other driver makes several attempts to kill him, Mann has to face down the monstrous, mysterious trucker on his own terms. 

"Duel," on a narrative level, is utter simplicity. It's essentially a one-man show for Dennis Weaver, as David Mann is the only named character in the entire film. The plot is whittled down to the absolute bare essentials. The protagonist's backstory, home life, and even his profession are never much elaborated on. He's up against a deliberately mysterious threat, an antagonist who is more an unknowable force than an actual character. The story can be described as nothing more than a series of encounters between these two vague personalities, until an inevitable final confrontation. "Duel's" plot is so simply that it honestly shouldn't even work. What even is there to this story to hook an audience? Why are we supposed to care about this character and whether he lives or dies? 

Yet it's easy to see Spielberg, a young filmmaker eager to prove himself, looking at the simplicity of the plot as an opportunity to show his skills. The very first second of "Duel" is a point-of-view shot of a car pulling out of the garage. From there, the opening credits – largely scored to the mindless chatter of talk radio – continue a first-person perspective of the endless freeway. This immediately accomplishes two things. From its first frame, "Duel" is established as a movie about movement. We will be on the road, the empty connecting fiber between places that actually have people in them, for the rest of the ninety-minutes to follow. The monotony and isolation of long-distance travel, and the constant movement of it, is the normalcy of the story, that will soon be disrupted by the horror of what's to come. 

The second thing this opening shot does is put the viewer in the main character's shoes. That P.O.V. shot makes it feel like it's us driving down the road. This allows the audience to immediately relate to the main character, even after the camera pulls back and we see his face. David Mann is designed to be vague. It's right there in his name: He is an every-Mann, an average guy with average guy problems that we can all relate to. That's what makes "Duel's" premise so delightfully terrifying. This could happen to anybody. We've all been on long drives. We've all passed pokey drivers ahead of us. That simple act is enough to enrage "Duel's" monstrous villain. A slight infraction, which is nothing more than a normal everyday action, causes this driver to devote his life to ruining the protagonist's day. The sheer random terror of that – that the smallest actions can have unexpected, shattering consequences – is what makes "Duel" such a simple but intimately relatable thrill ride. 

Spielberg and his team, including editor Frank Moriss, also work hard to insure the viewer feels the tension inherent in the situation. As Mann is first accosted by the truck, the camera remains within the cramped interior of his car. The editing is tight and fast, cutting quickly between Mann's panicked face, the reflection in his rear-view mirror, and the claustrophobic angles around the steering wheel. The frantic shooting and editing translates the raw panic Mann feels in that moment. In its best moments, “Duel” recaptures that frenzied feeling of terror. Such as another stand-out sequence, where the truck tears through a roadside attraction while David is stuck inside a small phone booth. The construction of each shot and camera angle in “Duel” is designed to ramp up the suspense.

Another everyday element “Duel's” simple premise plays on is the anonymity of being on the road. On a long drive, you'll pass a hundred other drivers. You'll barely see their faces, if at all, and there's no way to know what any of them might be thinking. “Duel” takes this quality to its maximum paranoia. After the first time the trucker nearly kills him, David stops at a diner. He scans the boots and faces of everyone seated at the bar. We're given a peek inside David's head, as her inner monologue tries to decide if any of these guys are the man who's been terrorizing him. In the window behind him, the truck looms in the background, casting the villain's presence over the entire scene. The protagonist is trying to sus out which of these ordinary guys is a lunatic and there's simply no way for him to know. That madmen walk among you and I, looking like anyone else, is another common fear “Duel” exploits successfully. 

As much as “Duel” is defined by its brutal efficiency, it's not lacking complexity either. David's last name being Mann doesn't just remind us of his everyman status. What little we learn about his backstory is that he has a tense relationship with his bickering wife. They have an on-going argument, about David's failed attempt to defend her from a lewd man at a recent party. He's also a Vietnam vet, which still haunts him. (If you really want to read into it, Vietnam was the first war were American imperialism, our cultural masculinity, failed. Which makes David's bruised male ego representative of American's wounded national identity.) When he attempts to interrogate a guy in the diner that he thinks might be the trucker, he's struck down quickly. In short: He's a man who doesn't feel very secure in his masculinity. 

While it's impossible to know why the trucker targeted him, reading “Duel” through this lens provides us with a motive. When David cut the driver off, it was a failed attempt to assert himself over another man. The trucker spends the rest of the movie tormenting and punishing David for this trespass. He's trying to dominate this other, “lesser” man. The sequence of the truck slowly pushing David's car onto train tracks even brings man-on-man sexual assault to mind. Considering cars and trucks are often read as phallic symbols, that doesn't seem like an entirely unreasonable reading. David is powerless against the trucker until he finally faces down the eighteen-wheeler, until he “mans up” and challenges the other man on his own terms. “Duel” can't help but read like a story of fragile American masculinity in crisis, of a man forced to prove himself against another bullying male. 

This is merely one interpretation of the film. In fact, “Duel's” simplicity has lent itself to a number of analytical readings over the years. The themes of challenged masculinity in the story have caused some to read layers of misogyny or homoeroticism into the film. Some critics see “Duel” as a story of class struggle, with David Mann's status as a salesman making him symbolic of the rich ruling class and the trucker, a blue-collar career, representative of the proletarian causes. Spielberg himself would refute this subtext and it doesn't exactly line up with the film's ending either. Yet others see “Duel” as postmodernism in action, the theme of “man versus machine” being literalized in its story of an average Mann fighting off a practically sentient truck of evil.

All of this is ultimately only speculation, because the film lets us know as little about the truck driver as possible. We see his boots in one scene and his hands even more briefly. Other than that, we learn nothing about the driver. Multiple times throughout the film, the truck doesn't even seem like a vehicle driven by a human being. Instead, “Duel's” antagonist increasingly feels like a machine that operates of its own will. That we learn nothing about the driver is intentional. The truck might as well be a manifestation of the unknowable, vindictive forces of the universe. It's equally implacable, appearing and disappearing seemingly whenever it will most freak out David. It lurks in the shadows of overpass bridges or at the corners of the frame, before speeding up on our hero in a way that should be impossible. The truck here is a predecessor to the shark in “Jaws,” an inscrutable predator that doggedly pursues the protagonist. Yet it's also a prototype for Michael Myers in “Halloween,” a relentless force of evil that displays a near-supernatural ability to terrorize and attack.

Through that lens, “Duel” is unquestionably a monster movie. And it has a hell of a monster at its center. Spielberg and his team made sure that the ominously looming truck was an unforgettable prop. The Peterbilt truck is enormous, making every other vehicle around it seem small in comparison. It's a mess of rusted metal, appearing as brown and earthy as the desert hills around it. The front end of the truck, often thrusts right into the camera, gives a crude impression of a face. The windshield and headlights form eyes of sorts, with the grill and bumper looking like an angry mouth. Spielberg's camera often takes us right into the twisting gears and pistons of the truck, further emphasizing what a creaking, rumbling monster it is. The film's sound design lays this on, with diesel roars, blaring horns, and shrieking metal-on-metal grinding. When the truck bites the dust, Spielberg made sure to layer a dinosaur-like roar over the crash, further informing the viewer what a monster this thundering vehicle is.

Spielberg does everything he can to make the truck a scary monster. As inhuman a threat as it is, as cryptic as its motives are, there's something undeniably sadistic and petty to its action. Throughout much of the film, the truck driver is fucking with David. He intentionally leads him into oncoming traffic. He drives him off the road and into a fence. He tries to push him into the path of a train. He lurks around a corner just as David impotently attempts to help a stuck school bus. The trucker chooses to strike at the moments when David is at his most defenseless. All these actions suggest a cruel intelligence, that enjoys toying with its prey. The truck isn't just an attacking brute but a vicious bully, who gets off on making someone smaller than itself squirm. 

When thought about in this context, “Duel” becomes a David Vs. Goliath story of a meek little man forced to step up against a bigger, stronger threat. The film's title is ultimately a little misleading. A duel implies two individual facing off against each other on equal footing, testing their skills against one another. David is hopelessly outmatched through the majority of “Duel's” runtime, in both strength and physical size. Only in the final minutes of the film does “Duel” become an actual, western-style duel, David turning towards the trucker and fighting him one-on-one. This is when the film's themes of strangled masculinity are resolved. It's also when its simple story wraps up. With one party defeated, the film subsequently ends, another example of “Duel's” brute force efficiency. 

However you choose to read “Duel,” it is a brutally effective thriller with a single real performance to its name. Dennis Weaver, cast due to Spielberg's film-brat fondness for “Touch of Evil,” plays David Mann as a squirmy ball of nerves. When introduced, he's already stressed and bored from being on the road for so long. As the truck continues to pursue and taunt him, he only grows sweatier and more unglued. Weaver makes for a compelling leading man, further helping the audience relate to an unlikely hero thrusts into a desperate situation. He's just on the right side of sniveling, creating a protagonist that is mildly dweeby but ultimately easy to root for. Only his voice-over narration, melodramatic at times, feel misplaced. 

“Duel” did so well in its television screening, and impressed critics and studio brass enough, that Universal paid the made-for-TV film a rare honor: Releasing it theatrically abroad. Spielberg was allowed to beef up the movie's run time, adding additional scenes to take it from 70 minutes to 90 minutes. (Mostly these moments comprise the school bus scene, the railway crossing scene, and the phone call between David and his wife.) This is the most widely available cut of “Duel” and the shorter, TV version was actually rather hard-to-find for years. Either version of “Duel” is a masterfully assembled exercise in tension, though the longer version is better. It's been praised as the greatest made-for-TV movie of all time and has influenced practically every on-the-road thriller that has followed. Once again, with limited resources, the young Spielberg would prove his skills and talent, turning a humble B-movie into a masterclass in film-making and suspense. “Duel” remains a brutally effective piece of screw-tightening road trip horror to this day. [Grade: A]