How Duel paved the foun­da­tion for Steven Spielberg’s career

We’ve all been there. You’re out on the road, alone behind the wheel of your auto­mo­bile, and start to feel an odd sense of men­ace. Anoth­er car is get­ting a bit too close for com­fort, mak­ing itself known in a way that sug­gests an antag­o­nis­tic force in its driver’s seat. Maybe they were going too slow and you made the deci­sion to pass them. Maybe you did noth­ing at all. What­ev­er the path to this moment, some­thing feels unmis­tak­ably off, and you start to con­sid­er what could hap­pen next.

This is the set-up for Duel, Steven Spielberg’s fea­ture-length debut from 1971, orig­i­nal­ly aired as an ABC Movie of the Week before its suc­cess led the stu­dio to have the direc­tor add a few scenes so the film would be long enough to run the­atri­cal­ly overseas.

Adapt­ed by Richard Math­e­son from his own short sto­ry, which orig­i­nal­ly ran in Play­boy, the film imag­ines the worst-case sce­nario of such a sit­u­a­tion for David Mann (Denis Weaver), a sales­man who runs afoul of the nev­er-seen dri­ver of a tanker truck. What fol­lows is a wrench­ing tale of esca­lat­ing ten­sion, with Spiel­berg nev­er tak­ing his foot off the gas. David’s sporty Ply­mouth Valiant – paint­ed bright red to stand out against the desert scenery – becomes a death trap, as he’s unable to escape this men­ac­ing game of cat-and-mouse.

In one of the film’s stand­out sequences, David abrupt­ly stops at a road­side café, hop­ing to lose the truck dri­ver. We fol­low a shak­en David, who believes he has final­ly evad­ed his pur­suer, in a one-shot that tracks him enter­ing the build­ing, head­ing into the bath­room, and then back out into the main area of the café. The shot doesn’t break until he reach­es the front win­dow, where he sees his worst fear: the truck is parked across the street. It dawns on David that any of the café patrons could be the assailant.

It’s a bril­liant bait-and-switch moment, the sort of trick Spiel­berg would lat­er hang his hat on. One need only look to the infa­mous moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a swords­man squares up against Indi­ana Jones only to have Indy prompt­ly shoot him down, to see the mis­di­rec­tion that Spiel­berg would lat­er employ. It’s a move lift­ed straight out of the Alfred Hitchock play­book, whom Spiel­berg cit­ed as a major influ­ence on Duel, which he described as being ​“like Psy­cho or The Birds, just on wheels”.

Spiel­berg thrives in min­i­mal­ism here, which is pre­cise­ly why Duel endures today. What­ev­er your thoughts on Spiel­berg, there’s no deny­ing his tech­ni­cal mas­tery – this is a film stripped back to its bare essen­tials, and the direc­tor excels in hav­ing to get cre­ative to make each moment feel as fresh and ener­gised as the last. Shot in just 13 days on loca­tion, Spiel­berg utilis­es unique cam­era place­ment, edit­ing rhythms, and a pre­cise atten­tion to detail, to turn what could have been a too-thin premise into a nail-bit­ing thriller.

Cred­it must also be giv­en to Math­e­son, whose script presents plen­ty to chew on. There is always some­thing lurk­ing beneath the sur­face in Matheson’s writ­ing, as evi­denced in The Incred­i­ble Shrink­ing Man and the numer­ous Twi­light Zone episodes he script­ed. In Duel, it’s an explo­ration of frag­ile mas­culin­i­ty, which emerges even before we meet the film’s pro­tag­o­nist in the flesh. Pri­or to see­ing David, we hear what’s on his car radio: a man fill­ing out a cen­sus, ques­tion­ing whether he is still allowed to con­sid­er him­self the ​“head of the house­hold” due to the fact that his wife goes off to work to pro­vide for the fam­i­ly while he stays home all day.

Soon, we dis­cov­er that David and his wife were in an alter­ca­tion the pre­vi­ous night where a man harassed her and David did noth­ing. In light of his ego shat­tered, this mam­moth truck loom­ing over David’s tiny sports car holds a deep­er mean­ing, reflect­ing the state of mas­culin­i­ty in ear­ly ​’70s Amer­i­ca. Spiel­berg would revis­it this theme numer­ous times through­out his career, from Jaws’ rep­re­sen­ta­tion of three very dif­fer­ent kinds of men in Roy Schei­der, Robert Shaw, and Richard Drey­fuss, to the many absent father fig­ures fea­tured in his films.

As with many first fea­tures, there is a temp­ta­tion to see Duel as a step­ping stone, but in a way it exem­pli­fies all of Spielberg’s great­est strengths as a film­mak­er before there was room for any poten­tial foibles to sink in. It remains a lean, mean, and wild­ly exhil­a­rat­ing descent into the dark depths of Amer­i­can male fragility.