Movie: 3/5
Chase: N/A
Even though Duel was excluded from the Hollywood Saloon car chase list that inspired this marathon because it was a feature length car chase, I wanted to see it because it was Spielberg’s first movie. The movie itself is entertaining but is packed with enough cheese (ah, voiceover, you’re a fickle mistress) that I found myself bored enough that I couldn’t rate it higher. This version of the movie runs 90 minutes, 16 minutes longer than the original 74 minute cut that was shown on TV. Spielberg expanded upon the original in order for it to be released overseas (apparently 90 minutes is/was the minimum). I wonder if I would’ve enjoyed the shorter cut better.
Visually, the film is stunning, especially when you consider the time he had to shoot it (10 days) and the budget (it was for TV after all). The shot of Dennis Weaver standing exasperated in the middle of the road, trying to make sense of the madness, is so iconic that it’s a wonder that it was probably cut away from to a dog food commercial. Spielberg talks at length in the extras about the cheats he used to accomplish the sense of speed on the truck which was, in reality, not all that fast. He did it so well that it never occured to me (except in the very few shots where it’s obviously sped up, something that Spielberg claims that was an unintentional result of a malfunctioning camera) that I was being misled. I just thought they souped up the vehicle for the film.
The aforementioned extras make this film required viewing. There’s no director’s commentary but instead there is a lengthy interview with the Spielberg of today discussing what Duel meant at that point in his career, what it took to make it and how it has informed nearly everything he’s done since. Particularly interesting is how the choice of never showing the driver of the truck and thus taking advantage of the fear of the unknown, an idea originating with screenwriter Richard Matheson, informed a lot of Spielberg’s later work, most notably Jaws. In fact, there’s a shot in the final moments of the film when the truck is destroyed (did you think it was going to end differently?) that directly inspired the death of Jaws, from the use of sound to the exact shots. Even Spielberg movies that would seem entirely unrelated to the unstoppable-killing-machine genre, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark owe a lot to Duel.
There are a few other extras including another interview with Spielberg focusing on his reluctant early work in television that resulted from his being shunned as the youngest director ever contracted at a studio (by Sidney Sheinberg, the guy who wanted Brazil to have a happy ending and Back to the Future to be called Space Zombies from Pluto, a disaster that was narrowly avoided with the help of…Steven Spielberg) and an interview with the screenwriter Roberth Matheson that I didn’t make it all the way through since it’s revealed that not only is Dennis Weaver’s character cheesily named Mann, but in the original short story the movie was based on, the truck driver’s name was Keller. Ugh.
If you’re at all interested in how Spielberg became what he is today, pick up this DVD and watch the extras back to back with the movie. It’s well worth it.
