The year was 1971. A young, punk kid of a director, barely out of film school and who had scarcely cut his teeth on TV episodes, pitched the impossible task of turning a short story about a truck from Playboy magazine into a feature-length TV movie of the week, shooting extensive car chases on location, in only ten days. It seemed a bellyflop waiting to happen, a classic Tinseltown Icarus tale of ambitious overshooting (in every sense of the word), and a potentially promising career cut ingloriously short.
Instead, cinema history was born.
The story of Duel's production (that young punk kid, of course, being one Steven Spielberg - maybe you've heard of him?) has, inevitably, since etched itself into Hollywood legend - a ballad of a film, and career, emphatically coaxed into being through sheer will, ingenuity, and equally generous helpings of hard work and luck. Regardless, it's a testament to the gumption and keen intuition of that Spielberg kid that his film still stands alone, far from overshadowed by its own behind-the-scenes. A crackling, ruthlessly whittled down hour-and-a-half of pure suspense, Duel is as lean, mean, and voraciously fun as they come, a classic in singularly white-knuckle tension practically bursting at the seams with cinematic joie-de-vivre.
Like so many of the best suspense thrillers, the impetus for Duel's conflict is so universally accessible (a simple case of road rage gone mad) it's almost primal. Like an eighteen wheeler version of the Jaws shark, Spielberg's malevolent truck and ever-unseen driver (a classy, timeless touch) are less antagonist and more force of nature, defying laws of laws, manners, speed limits, and narrative conventions alike to run down travelling salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver), no matter what. And as excellent as Weaver is, delivering a masterclass in amiable charisma turned weedy, paranoid histrionics, Spielberg's truck is just as timelessly perilous an adversary, streaked in oil smears and insect corpses like war paint, and roaring and rumbling with nail-biting menace.
In terms of sheer exercise in formal perfection, it's hard to do better than Duel. Spielberg's pacing is honed to razor-sharp, rollercoaster precision, aggressively accelerating and coasting between patches of overwhelming action and spells of suspicious respite, while keeping the tension unfalteringly dialled up to 11 throughout. He gradually but continuously gears up from a meditative opening - a dreamy, first-person opening of Mann leaving suburbia and entering the desert highway with the radio peacefully chattering in the background - to the relatively innocuous cat-and-mouse back and forth passing between car and truck. Suddenly, we find ourselves clutching the passenger door handle in the midst of a dizzyingly intense, breathless chase, with both vehicles zooming down the highway at breakneck speeds, as cameras capture the frenzy perched precariously on dashboards, or zooming by with death-defying low-angle shots that feel palpably dangerous. It's a robust, exhausting thrill ride that cements its standing alongside Bullit and The French Connection as one of the great car chases of the epoch. All that within the first 25 minutes - and things only get more frantic from that point on!
Fortunately, Spielberg, and scribe Richard Matheson, are savvy to the pitfalls of how easily a feature-length car chase could grow boring, and they each bust out each clever trick in the book in keeping the vehicles in motion, and their audience engaged. Intermittent pauses in the action - Mann stops to tussle with his wife over the phone, or feverishly scrutinize beer-guzzling truckers at a café, attempting to deduce which one ardently wants him dead - may allow the audience to catch their breath as the vehicles refuel, but are no less tense, as Spielberg keeps a mercilessly tight grip on the tension valve. So consistent is the veil of perennial danger that each sudden scuff of a passerby's boot or clink of glass on a café table bring the frenzied cortisol rush of a gunshot, with Spielberg's sound editing playfully amping up each looming threat. Matheson and Spielberg also demonstrate a knack for sucker-punching the tension with moments of subtly bizarre humour (an expansive display of snake terrariums framing a gas station action sequence is nearly as good as the truck stopping to help a stranded school bus full of jubilantly chattering kids mid-chase - and don't forget to listen for the sneaky Godzilla scream cameo Spielberg was too mirthful to resist), as if coaxing the audience into cathartic relate through nervous laughter. It's not entirely airtight - Matheson's sporadic patches of Weaver's nervy voiceover are a tad cheesy and unnecessary - but so damn near close it boggles the mind.
Imagine jumping into a race car in front of Alfred Hitchcock let loose after chugging a pot full of coffee, and you'll start to get a sense of the heady, intoxicating thrills of Spielberg's immaculate directorial debut. As riveting as it is fun, Duel is a modest classic of relentless suspense, voraciously flayed down to the bare essentials, injected with pure, unfiltered adrenaline, and filmed gorgeously with unfettered delight. It's a heady, cheeky rush of pure cinema, and it's oodles more effective and unforgettable than it had any business being. Maybe that Spielberg kid will amount to something after all.
-9/10
Instead, cinema history was born.
The story of Duel's production (that young punk kid, of course, being one Steven Spielberg - maybe you've heard of him?) has, inevitably, since etched itself into Hollywood legend - a ballad of a film, and career, emphatically coaxed into being through sheer will, ingenuity, and equally generous helpings of hard work and luck. Regardless, it's a testament to the gumption and keen intuition of that Spielberg kid that his film still stands alone, far from overshadowed by its own behind-the-scenes. A crackling, ruthlessly whittled down hour-and-a-half of pure suspense, Duel is as lean, mean, and voraciously fun as they come, a classic in singularly white-knuckle tension practically bursting at the seams with cinematic joie-de-vivre.
Like so many of the best suspense thrillers, the impetus for Duel's conflict is so universally accessible (a simple case of road rage gone mad) it's almost primal. Like an eighteen wheeler version of the Jaws shark, Spielberg's malevolent truck and ever-unseen driver (a classy, timeless touch) are less antagonist and more force of nature, defying laws of laws, manners, speed limits, and narrative conventions alike to run down travelling salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver), no matter what. And as excellent as Weaver is, delivering a masterclass in amiable charisma turned weedy, paranoid histrionics, Spielberg's truck is just as timelessly perilous an adversary, streaked in oil smears and insect corpses like war paint, and roaring and rumbling with nail-biting menace.
In terms of sheer exercise in formal perfection, it's hard to do better than Duel. Spielberg's pacing is honed to razor-sharp, rollercoaster precision, aggressively accelerating and coasting between patches of overwhelming action and spells of suspicious respite, while keeping the tension unfalteringly dialled up to 11 throughout. He gradually but continuously gears up from a meditative opening - a dreamy, first-person opening of Mann leaving suburbia and entering the desert highway with the radio peacefully chattering in the background - to the relatively innocuous cat-and-mouse back and forth passing between car and truck. Suddenly, we find ourselves clutching the passenger door handle in the midst of a dizzyingly intense, breathless chase, with both vehicles zooming down the highway at breakneck speeds, as cameras capture the frenzy perched precariously on dashboards, or zooming by with death-defying low-angle shots that feel palpably dangerous. It's a robust, exhausting thrill ride that cements its standing alongside Bullit and The French Connection as one of the great car chases of the epoch. All that within the first 25 minutes - and things only get more frantic from that point on!
Fortunately, Spielberg, and scribe Richard Matheson, are savvy to the pitfalls of how easily a feature-length car chase could grow boring, and they each bust out each clever trick in the book in keeping the vehicles in motion, and their audience engaged. Intermittent pauses in the action - Mann stops to tussle with his wife over the phone, or feverishly scrutinize beer-guzzling truckers at a café, attempting to deduce which one ardently wants him dead - may allow the audience to catch their breath as the vehicles refuel, but are no less tense, as Spielberg keeps a mercilessly tight grip on the tension valve. So consistent is the veil of perennial danger that each sudden scuff of a passerby's boot or clink of glass on a café table bring the frenzied cortisol rush of a gunshot, with Spielberg's sound editing playfully amping up each looming threat. Matheson and Spielberg also demonstrate a knack for sucker-punching the tension with moments of subtly bizarre humour (an expansive display of snake terrariums framing a gas station action sequence is nearly as good as the truck stopping to help a stranded school bus full of jubilantly chattering kids mid-chase - and don't forget to listen for the sneaky Godzilla scream cameo Spielberg was too mirthful to resist), as if coaxing the audience into cathartic relate through nervous laughter. It's not entirely airtight - Matheson's sporadic patches of Weaver's nervy voiceover are a tad cheesy and unnecessary - but so damn near close it boggles the mind.
Imagine jumping into a race car in front of Alfred Hitchcock let loose after chugging a pot full of coffee, and you'll start to get a sense of the heady, intoxicating thrills of Spielberg's immaculate directorial debut. As riveting as it is fun, Duel is a modest classic of relentless suspense, voraciously flayed down to the bare essentials, injected with pure, unfiltered adrenaline, and filmed gorgeously with unfettered delight. It's a heady, cheeky rush of pure cinema, and it's oodles more effective and unforgettable than it had any business being. Maybe that Spielberg kid will amount to something after all.
-9/10
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