Weaponized 40-ton truck

DUEL (1971)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Reprinted with permission by Steel Notes Magazine

Right at the start of Steven Spielberg's masterfully exciting "Duel," you can see the unimaginable road trip the main character has to face. The unaired theatrical version of this TV-movie shows Dennis Weaver's Red Plymouth Valiant pulling out of a suburban garage from his intrinsic point-of-view (Suburbia has been an iconic staple of Spielberg’s work). Through a series of dissolves, Weaver’s character travels through the city streets and tunnels until he is finally in the lonely desert road. He is David Mann, a salesman presumably headed to some city or town for a meeting. We never know what David sells nor do we need to. When he tries to pass a gas tanker truck in a Californian two-lane road stretch, the truck roars past David like a bat out of hell. It startles David and before long, the chase is on. This is not so much a cat-and-mouse chase – it is a terrifying chase picture where the truck driver’s intent is to kill David.

The only instance where the film rests is literally at rest stops. A truck stop café is the setting for various truck drivers who look on at David as David is sitting at a table, imagining which one is the menace on the highway. David can’t figure it out and, alarmingly, as he picks a fight with one truck driver who has similar-looking boots, the ominous gas tanker truck through the window’s background takes off. It is a virtuoso Spielberg scare scene, anticipating the menace of the unseen shark in his very own “Jaws” three years later. A Snakerama gas station stop (also featured in Spielberg’s “1941”) that features rattlesnakes as its main attraction gets awry when David uses a payphone and sees the truck is headed right into it. David escapes in the nick of time (a cliffhanging moment that is as hair-raising as Indiana Jones’s own wondrous cliffhangers that Spielberg himself later directed) and the truck practically demolishes everything in its path. When David manages to elude the driver near a railroad crossing, he sits in his car for hours, feeling elated at the prospect that the nightmare is over. As soon as he starts his engine and leaves, he stops in the middle of the road and sees the truck yet again, waiting impatiently for the chase to continue.

“Duel” is relentless, manic and in-your-face, a brutal nightmare that takes place in daylight. 35 years later after its debut on television, it still carries a hypnotic charge. The film could’ve been a bore had it been one endless chase scene but it’s got the presence of Dennis Weaver and an ugly-looking truck to compensate, not to mention Spielberg’s tight direction and constant changes in composition so that you never feel you are looking at the same shot over and over again. It is “Jaws” on wheels only this sort of restless panic where road rage and aggression take center stage is a reality faced by many motorists daily, more so than the prospect of running into a hungry shark. What Spielberg does so cleverly is to make us fear for David’s plight and we never know if David will survive it. That Red Plymouth Valiant is no match for a grimy-looking gas tanker truck emitting all sorts of exhaust into the atmosphere – a tree-hugging liberal’s nightmare. But the environment is hardly what David cares about, it is the lack of control he has over this unseen driver (only the driver’s boots and his arm are ever visible). When it is all over after the truck plunges over a cliff, David feels victorious and jumps up and down. Then he settles down and sits on the edge of a cliff, looking despondent. The nightmare may be over but we never know what really stimulated the truck driver to aggressively attack David (the various license plates in the truck’s front bumper certainly suggest that this driver has done this before). There is calm and unease and the victory slowly dissipates. “Duel” is about a lonely man on a lonely two-lane road who, by the end of the film, is more alone than ever.