Duel (1971)

Author: Brett Gallman
Submitted by: Brett Gallman   Date : 2013-07-02 07:44
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Written by: Richard Matheson
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Dennis Weaver, Jacqueline Scott, and Eddie Firestone


Reviewed by: Brett Gallman






"You just never know...you just go along figuring some things don't change, like being able to drive on a public highway without someone trying to murder you."


Richard Matheson’s oeuvre boasts well over a hundred works, but Duel must have been among the most personal to the recently deceased author—quite literally. As recounted by the man himself, the story was inspired by a harrowing incident where he and a friend were briefly harassed by a truck driver. That it occurred on the day of John Kennedy’s assassination seems appropriate since the story immediately captures America’s post-JFK morass: the confusion, the fear, the inexplicable evil. Matheson distilled into something primal, a conflict between man and a relentless man-made machine that reflected the overarching fear that something both natural and unnatural was out to get even the common everyman.

Over the next several years, things only got worse, of course, and it may have resonated even more once America entered the 70s fully shed of its innocence. By that point, Duel had been published in Playboy and eventually found its way into the lap of Steve Spielberg, a college drop-out who’d been hanging around and interning at Universal for a few years. Having already directed some television episodes for the studio, he convinced Universal to adapt the novelette for an ABC Movie of the Week. No one could have known it at the time, but it ended up being a perfect match since Spielberg would go on to become one of the decade’s most prominent directors when it came to relaying that struggle against the current, a motif that would especially repeat throughout his early work.

It’s stripped to the bare essentials in Duel, which finds L.A. salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) in the middle of a business trip that’s routine to the point of being mundane as he drifts down the highway as talk radio chatters in the background. When an enormous tanker truck appears in front of him, he maneuvers around it innocently enough, but the act unwittingly awakens something sinister in the truck’s driver, who decides to start toying with David. The interplay starts out innocuously, with the two passing each other on the highway; however, when David decides to pull over at a gas station and the tanker follows suit, it becomes obvious that the driver has some darker intentions in store.

Even without its subtext, Duel is a meticulously crafted thriller that features Spielberg going full-on Hitchcock. Such a comparison is perhaps too easy and obvious given the glaring touchstones: a wrong man, a pursuit, the inevitable, inescapable evil at the core (talk about really capturing the uncertainty of the 60s—both Psycho and The Birds were pre-JFK but revealed that Hitch had sensed the darkness that would soon creep into cinema). But Duel is specifically Hitchcockian in Spielberg’s ability to craft white-knuckle suspense through masterful camerawork and even more masterful editing. From the beginning, it was obvious that he knew exactly where to place the camera and how long each shot should linger. The chase scenes here represent a master-class in minimalist suspense-building; armed with only a threadbare premise, one actor, a camera, and Billy Goldenberg’s channeling of Bernard Herrmann, Spielberg constructed one of cinema’s great cat-and-mouse games and opened the gates for similar highway horrors.

It’s also easy to see how it could have been undone in lesser hands. Duel teeters on quite a precipice, as its leanness can be both a boon and a curse; it’s a story that thrives on that inexplicable evil at its center—the driver’s intentions (or, hell, his very existence) are never confirmed. Calling him a maniac might even be misguided since that would attribute too much of a human quality; instead, this thing is a relentless force of nature, armed with inhuman patience and a total disregard for either David’s safety or his own. It’s basically the shark from Jaws or Michael Myers with a fuel tank, and there’s something playful about him that particularly anticipates Carpenter’s Shape (for example, the driver does assist a stalled school bus before promptly resuming his pursuit). Obviously, that idea is appealing, but it’s not exactly a slam dunk when stretched out over 90 minutes, but Spielberg makes it work because the tanker becomes an enigma shrouded in plumes of exhaust. Ironically enough, it does begin to take on a personality, and you can start to feel a menace in those headlights, which act as windows to a twisted, impenetrable 40-ton soul. Whereas Spielberg would create menace through absence in Jaws, he does the opposite here by forging the tanker into a monolith of unrelenting carnage, a modern abyss on 18 wheels.

Specifically, it’s targeted this guy David Mann, whose on-the-nose surname posits him as the modern everyman suddenly besieged by an inescapable situation. Weaver begins as coiffed and confident behind the wheel but soon begins to unravel once he realizes what he’s caught up in. To ensure that the film doesn’t stall when it’s briefly off-road, Spielberg stages a sweaty, claustrophobic sequence in a dusty, roadside dive where Mann frantically seeks a means of escape. While Weaver’s performance acts as a solid chronicle of a man put through the ringer, the character also allows viewers to project various subtexts and themes. By his own admission, Matheson meant for Mann to be an everyman, but Spielberg specifically molds him into a specifically ineffectual 70s leading man. Cut from the same cloth as David Sumner and Chief Brody, Mann’s surname soon refers to his very masculinity when a phone call home turns into an argument after his wife berates him for not standing up to an oaf that was “practically raping” her at a recent party (the scene comes complete with two kids playing in the foreground, so there’s your requisite Spielbergian absent father stuff to boot). Suddenly, his looming conflict takes on an even deeper meaning—not only is he fighting for his survival, but he’s also looking to reclaim his manhood in the face of violence. Weaver is a far cry from a square-jawed, dashing badass because he quite frankly looks like hell and reluctantly accepts that he’ll have to stare down this force and confront it.

Spielberg would later become associated with a spirited Old Hollywood approach as his career wore on, but there’s a slight darkness skirting around the edges of Duel. This is most obviously felt in its ending, which is a triumphant one that’s still shadowed by Mann’s creeping realization that this ordeal has shaken him. While it’s not as subversive or ambiguous as similar 70s revenge fables like Straw Dogs and Last House on the Left, it’s not exactly as exuberant as Chief Brody’s exultant celebration, which finds him safely paddling back to the shore. Instead, Duel leaves its protagonist stalled on the side of the road, contemplatively staring off into the sunset, a closing image that suggests the crossroads at which America found itself. Essentially, Duel is a road movie where the road has mutated from an airy sanctuary to a terrifying, claustrophobic hell that’s constantly forcing Mann to confront the modern malaise in the form of radio chatter, tourist traps, and his own inevitable doom. Even if the driver isn’t successful, there’s something sinister about it being an instrument of sheer mortality (Lucio Fucli would make this subtext the text of Door into Silence 20 years later). If Easy Rider represented the sudden death of 60s blacktop frontier, then Duel was one of its earliest wakes, as the road is immediately presented as the path out of the comforts of suburbia into a wild, untamed wilderness where death lurks.

Maybe it’s just the retroactive bullshit powers of the auteur theory kicking in, but it seems pretty obvious where Spielberg was headed from here. His behind-the-scenes confidence is well-known (he may have been the most brash of the New Hollywood bunch), and it spills onto the screen here. Each moment feels expertly rigged and calculated, and, even after Spielberg went back to pad out the running time for a theatrical re-release, it’s still a lean, precise movie. Spielberg himself has noted that the kernel of Jaws is especially here, and it’s a reminder that he could have been a hell of a horror master had he stuck to that genre (he did direct Something Evil, another made-for-TV horror that’s sadly never surfaced). Duel took a while to pop up on DVD itself, as Spielberg didn’t get around to approving it for release until 2004, at which point Universal gave it a special edition treatment that features the 90-minute theatrical cut. The presentation retains the original 1.33 ratio (an oddity itself in the Spielberg canon) and the original 2.0 mono track; remixed 5.1 Dolby and DTS tracks also appear to offer a more robust soundstage. Extras include a photograph gallery, a trailer, production notes, bios for the cast and crew, and interviews with Spielberg and Matheson. I feel like I’ve extolled the virtues of the former a lot here, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the latter. Without Matheson’s clever hook and his commitment to keying in on such a primal conflict, Duel wouldn’t be what it is, and one could argue that the same might be true of Spielberg’s career. Imagine that: the history of film hinged on a chance encounter with an issue of Playboy. It’s a good thing Spielberg’s assistant read it for the articles. Buy it!



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