Driving Around With DUEL: SPIELBERG SUMMER Begins!

From the time I started writing about movies as a hobby, a thought had been rattling around in my brain.

How am I going to do it?

It’s one of the first things that crossed my mind after working my way through the filmography of Martin Scorsese during 2020, a project from an earlier iteration of this blog finally completed.  As I got to thinking of other legendary directors with a varied and rich body of work, I had to ignore the voice in my head that kept repeating a simple phrase.

You should do it.

I had brought up the idea to friends in the past, and they would say the same thing I had been telling myself for four years.

Do it.

Just do it.

So, fine.  I’m doing it.

Just like I’m guessing pretty much every film fan born between 1970 and 1990, Steven Spielberg was the first director whose work I fell in love with.  I have my mom to credit for that one; she made damn sure I was going to be growing up seeing stuff like JAWS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and JURASSIC PARK.  I get the instinct; all three of those movies were and remain stone cold classics, the type of movies you’ve literally never heard anyone say a bad word about.  But, in truth, I think my mom has always pulled inspiration from Spielberg’s personal story: born into a family directly affected by the Holocaust, Steven had to rise above both antisemetic attacks in school and struggles with his faith by burying himself into his obsessions with watching and making movies.  I never suffered anything even remotely close to that in my own life, but considering I was a kid who sometimes felt aimless and anxious even at the age of nine, I think my mom found some sort of path forward with sharing Spielberg’s biography and career with me.  (Does this make me the Steven Spielberg of writing intermittently about movies?  Who’s to say?)

So okay, fine, I’m doing it.  But it didn’t solve the bigger issue….how do I do it?  As of this writing, Spielberg has made a grand total of 36 feature length films* which, by my math, is sixteen weeks shy of 52.  To tackle Spielberg’s filmography the way it deserves to be tackled (individually, week by week) would essentially make this a year-long project.  And that presumes I don’t get distracted by a shiny object somewhere along the way, and lord knows I have too much ADHD flowing through my veins for that.

*Yes, for the purpose of actually being able to get through this without running the risk of passing away before its completion, I’m skipping his episodic television work, as well as his producing credits, although I could likely do a whole year on just TINY TOON ADVENTURES, ANIMANIACS and FREAKAZOID alone.

But then, I realized….why not take it decade by decade?  After all, the last half century has yielded specific ups and downs in Spielberg’s career, and each individual decade has at least one masterpiece that will be a treat to revisit, as well as some less popular works I’ve never seen.  Why don’t we just slow roll this thing and dedicate the next few summers in this space to going through every Steven Spielberg movie ever made?  What are you going to do, fight me on it?

So…let’s do this!  I’m finally doing it.  I’m finally working my way through the works of Steven Spielberg.  Starting today, and every other week for the next ten weeks, we’re going to explore the five feature-length movies he made between 1971 and 1979!  For reference, we would begin with today’s subject, DUEL.  Following that will be THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and, of course, 1941.  Good times.

Even if we weren’t going chronologically, the seventies would make for an excellent and intriguing starting point for a Spielberg career retrospective.  It’s easy to forget, now that the Steven Spielberg Brand has been so well-established, but he was an important thread in the New Hollywood movement.  Of course, he was arguably an equally important thread in putting an end to what New Hollywood typically stood for.  By cutting his teeth on more character driven (and moderately budgeted) work such as SUGARLAND EXPRESS, Spielberg ushered in a new era of busting blocks and popping corn with JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.  By the end of the 70’s, Hollywood had seemed to form into something more populist.  As a result, it sometimes feels like Spielberg’s artistic integrity has been mildly questioned, as least in comparison to other seventies titans like Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, John Cassavetes and Stanley Kubrick.

But, I would argue the reason “Spielberg” became a genre all its own is because he never lost that knack for character-driven drama, even amidst the spectacle of his most famous works.  Yeah, you show up to JAWS for the scary shark, but it’s the beautifully understated performance of Roy Scheider that stays with you.  It’s the persistent quest of Roy Neary that makes CLOSE ENCOUNTERS what it is.  It’s even, as you’ll see, the relatable loserdom of David Mann that makes DUEL so potent.  Although it’ll be interesting to track the quality of his output as we get closer to modern day, it seems to be that he rarely loses at least that key quality.

Taking his seventies’ work as a single set is to watch him navigate his inherent skills behind the camera, and his natural interests as a human, and filter them through an increasing scope before it arguably grows too unwieldy and blows up on him.  Needless to say, I’m excited.  I hope you are as well.

Welcome to SPIELBERG SUMMER: YEAR ONE - THE SEVENTIES!

DUEL (1971)

Starring: Dennis Weaver

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Richard Matheson

Length: 74 minutes (expanded to 90 minutes for 1983 theatrical run)

Released: November 13, 1971

I can’t say with any confidence how many people reading this have ever truly tried to commute within the confines of California.  What I can say, though, is that I spent four years of my life driving the 53 miles between Sacramento and Stockton twice a day, five days a week.  I don’t know that the entire 110,240 miles really looked like the stretch of road that serves as the setting for DUEL, but I promise that every miserable inch of that commute 100% felt like it.

Even if you’ve never seen DUEL, you’ve almost certainly heard of it, even if just as “Steven Spielberg’s first film!!”  You likely know it vaguely as “that movie where a guy gets chased around by a truck”.  If your awareness only runs that deep, then, you’ll be surprised to hear that DUEL is...a movie where…a guy gets chased around…

…by a truck.

It turns out that DUEL is a masterpiece in high-level summary.  It’s a TV movie made with all A-plot in mind; David Mann (Dennis Weaver) is a salesman who has hit the road in order to meet with a client.  His loping, winding, boring drive from Point A to Point B is interrupted when a truck allows him to pass through the one-lane highway they’re both on, only to immediately begin to try to run David off the road.  The aggressive driver is never seen, turning the truck itself into a character, one that billows enough smoke to connote the devil himself.  Along the way, David makes several pit stops, including a diner, a phone booth on the property of an exotic animal trainer, and an abandoned school bus.  By the end, either David or the truck driver will find themselves in a fiery inferno.  Who will it be?  Man or machine?

(You should know, by the way, that I resisted making that last sentence “Mann or machine?”, but only because I saw somebody else make that joke already.  Anyway.)

I remember seeing DUEL for the first time about twenty years ago when Universal first released it on DVD back in 2004.  Up to that point, I had known DUEL exclusively as that aforementioned mythical “first Spielberg movie”, the one that launched the wunderkind TV director’s career, the best TV movie of all time, the cult classic to end all cult classics.  To be honest, though, I don’t have much of a memory of that first watch.  It’s entirely possible I didn’t even finish it.  For better or worse, I found it to be the exact movie I was sold.  A guy is driving down the road and starts getting increasingly harassed by another guy in a truck.  Extend and escalate for 90 minutes, bada bing, bada boom, you’ve got DUEL.  As a (extremely relative) longtime Spielberg fan, I was glad I saw it.  But it was mostly a curiosity and nothing further.

DUEL, then, gains a ton of power as one marches into adulthood and you begin to realize how much of your life is spent sitting in a car, zoning out and winding through some unremarkable road or highway.  There are days when you reflect on your commute and wonder how you even managed to get home at all, for as little brain power as you were putting into it all.  Drive long enough, turn your brain down enough, and it’s entirely possible you could find yourself in a life-or-death struggle between you and some asshole in a truck.

As it turns out, the genius of the November 13th, 1971 ABC Movie of the Week is that the horror is plausible.  It could even happen to you later today.

Needless to say, I found DUEL wildly compelling this time around.

———

By 1971, Steven Spielberg was already a director on the way up; after making his debut by directing Joan Crawford in the 1969 pilot of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, Spielberg became a TV director for hire, working on famous programs such as Columbo and Marcus Welby, M.D., learning old-school techniques on the way, while also finding room to experiment where he could.  Eventually, his reputation was steady enough that Universal commissioned him to do four television movies, a deal that ended up yielding only three.  The second was 1972’s SOMETHING EVIL (CBS), the third was 1973’s SAVAGE (NBC).  The first, and easily most famous, was 1971’s DUEL (ABC).

It should be noted that the version of DUEL that aired in 1971 was a lean, mean 71-minute cut of the film, perfect for the 90-minute time slot it had been afforded.  The version of DUEL I suspect most people have seen is the 90-minute cut that was created for a 1983 theatrical run, a project commissioned off the back of Spielberg’s remarkable run in 1982 (his directing of E.T. and his co-writing and producing of POLTERGEIST).  Some of the extra scenes feel fairly obvious and perfunctory (I’ll talk about one of them in a second); some scenes surprisingly fit right in, the primary of which being a sequence with the broken down school bus.  People seem a little split on this part, with some characterizing it as too Disney-esque.  I actually kind of dug it, as it’s a moment where the unseen truck driver varies up their method of torture, shifting from aggression to something more beneath-the-surface sinister.  In this sequence, David is hesitant to help push the stranded school bus, not only because he’s in fear of his life, but because he’s not particularly thrilled about his hood getting scratched up.  When the truck reappears to continue chasing David, it takes a quick time out to pleasantly push the bus back onto the road.  For lack of a better phrase, David’s cucking is complete.

That’s another aspect of DUEL, by the way, that you just don’t get as a kid: how the main tormentor for David Mann isn’t the mysterious aggressor in the truck, it’s life itself.  

The obvious question regarding extending out the premise of DUEL more than a few scenes, let alone to ninety minutes, is “why doesn’t David just let this go?”  Yes, obviously, both he and the truck driver eventually reach a point of no return, where both pairs of heels have been dug in too far for this not to end in someone’s death.  However, the genius of the storytelling here is how deftly, but emphatically, it shows us just how powerless David really is in his day-to-day life.  His commute is constant and extremely boring.  His job is vaguely defined, but involves him selling something nondescript to various faceless clients.  It’s implied that his private life provides no relief, as he quips to a gas station attendant who just referred to him as boss, “not at home, I’m not”.

(It should be mentioned that the ninety minute cut makes a bigger deal of the home life thing, with an entire added sequence of David on a pay phone having a tense, emasculating conversation with his wife.  We get to see the wife and everything.  It’s filmed with competence and well framed, and if you’re trying to add 18 minutes to a movie, it’s a logical place to expand.  But…I don’t really like it.  The scene is proof positive that one need not visualize what can be expressed in a single sentence.  Sorry, I just wanted to vent about it.  Moving on.)

David is just kind of a loser, or at least (more importantly) he perceives himself as one.  So when a truck loping along the same stretch of road as him starts being kind of a dick, he decides to stand his ground for once and be a dick right back.  And, as it goes for most of us, this proves to be his folly.  It’s maybe the ultimate inciting incident for a story, one that makes you yell at the screen for a character to just drop it, while knowing deep down that you may have done something similar yourself.  It’s an understandable and recognizable human instinct and that’s why it’s so compelling.  It helps that Dennis Weaver plays David with such an Everyman quality; even when he’s panicking and making poor decisions, you can’t help but recognize parts of yourself within him.

There are issues with the script, a Richard Matheson adaptation of his own short story, the primary of which being the overwritten voiceover monologues for Weaver.  It’s got to be terrifying to write a script with almost no dialogue, and I’m sure it felt like there was a need to verbalize something about this crazy situation David finds himself in.  But the voiceovers are almost uniformly unnecessary, to the point where I was convinced these were additional theatrical cut extensions, meant to streamline the emotions of the picture.  Alas, no, they were there from the jump, an unusual misstep for an otherwise tight film.

One has to figure, though, that these voiceovers stand out all the more because there’s so much else right about DUEL.  The constant creativity; its sense of rapid, but never overwhelming, pace; its Hitchcock-ian sense of tension building (the best moment of the movie might be David trying, and failing, to track the type of boots his assailant wears).  A special note must be made of its sense of world-building, as well.  A key piece of exposition comes not from a David Mann voiceover, nor really from anybody talking to David at all.  It comes from the AM radio talk show David is listening to in the car.  It’s a bunch of dudes calling in talking about how they no longer feel like the man in their own homes.  It’s another reason why the added scene with David on the phone with his wife is so unnecessary; anything that sequence might have established, Spielberg and Matheson have already baked into DUEL, practically in the background.

———

So, where does DUEL stand in the greater Spielberg canon?  Well, it’s hard not to watch it without immediately reflecting on JAWS, a movie with the same general idea (swap out a truck with a shark and you’re already halfway there), although given the new brand of Hollywood polish that would go on to define the work of Spielberg and most of his contemporaries for decades to come.  Funnily enough, this was the movie that made Universal realize that he was ready for a movie with the scale of JAWS, although there’d be another theatrical movie in between, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, which we’ll break down in full in two weeks.

More to the point, however, is that DUEL’s major legacy is as Spielberg’s first major shot across the bow.  At just twenty-five years old, and after doing consistently solid work on television (including the first Columbo episode), he had shown that he was special in a way that not many others at the time were.  In a world where TV movies could be a legitimate launching point for major filmmakers (i.e. an extinct world), Spielberg completely took advantage of the training ground he had been afforded.  As mentioned, the only real issues with DUEL come from the script, and even those are easy to forget when taking the movie in totality.  From a directorial standpoint, Spielberg already had the steady hand of a seasoned pro, establishing a character expeditiously, then putting him through the ringer in the way any average reasonable person could relate to, heightening the stakes all along the way.  

All in all, DUEL isn’t quite a masterpiece, but it’s close.  As it turned out, it didn’t need to be anything more.

In two weeks: 1974’s THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS!