Dueling Carburetors
Duel (1971)—Directed by Steven Spielberg
By Michael van den Bos
In 1971, then 24-year-old Steven Spielberg directed a supercharged thriller about a trucker menacing an innocent motorist. That’s all there is to the story of Duel —essentially a cat-and-mouse chase with several tons of Detroit steel burning reams of rubber and gallons of gasoline along miles of California desert highway. This is arguably the first movie to portray road-rage on screen before the term existed, and it showcased the young Spielberg as a talented director with feature film ambitions.
As the world’s most famous and successful film director, Steven Spielberg had to start somewhere. That somewhere was at Universal Studios as a television director. Spielberg’s first professional gigs were directing episodes of Marcus Welby, M.D. , The Psychiatrist , and Columbo .
Itching to work out his cinematic muscles, Spielberg convinced Universal executives that he could direct Duel as an ABC-TV movie of the week. He promised he could make the film in ten days—a daunting schedule then as now. The Universal brass gave the kid with the brass balls the go-ahead, but with the condition that if he went over schedule he’d be replaced with a veteran director. Spielberg wrapped the TV movie in a little under two weeks. Replacement wasn’t necessary because Spielberg’s footage displayed an extraordinary talent and a keen visual eye.
The script was written by Richard Matheson, based on his short story. Matheson was a sci-fi/horror writer who wrote some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone . Dennis Weaver is David Mann, a beleaguered family man who’s driving his red Valiant from Los Angeles to a business meeting across the desert. A truck begins to tailgate David. He eventually allows the anonymous driver to pass, but this gesture backfires as the trucker uses his rig to slow David down, cut him off, and then deliberately run him off the road. David is thrown into manic hysteria as it becomes obvious that this truck is targeting him for roadkill.
Duel is a tight thriller that owes much to Hitchcock. The David Mann character is an obvious archetype of the average Joe, and Spielberg gets you to identify with the character as Hitchcock would by keeping your attention squarely on Weaver’s performance. He offers only glimpses of the terrorist truck driver as Mann sees him—boots walking behind the oily tanker’s tires, or an arm waving Mann to pass—if he dare. The spirit of Hitchcock also infects Duel ’s beautifully realized suspense and the film’s basic theme of an ordinary man caught in an extraordinary circumstance. David’s banal life literally spins out of control into motor madness.
Duel is essentially a silent film. There’s very little dialogue, and if it weren’t there, you could still follow the story. Even so, the sound-effects design and the aggressive “music-noise” score by Billy Goldenberg—at times reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores—rev up the fear and the anxiety that are remarkable in a TV movie.
Duel gave Steven Spielberg a clear highway to show off his thrilling cinematic colors that foreshadowed the movie muscle cars of Jaws , Raiders of the Lost Ark , and Jurassic Park .