In this directorial debut by a 24-year-old Steven Spielberg, David Mann (Dennis Weaver) is a middle-aged delivery driver traversing a highway along the Southern Pacific coast on a business trip. Upon entering the Mojave Desert he encounters a fuel track and, pressed for time, decides to overtake it. Bad idea. A very bad idea, actually. Because whoever's behind the wheel of this truck - and we never see them - instantly takes that as a declaration of war, and they then kick the truck into top gear. Now David must do a high-speed chase battle with one increasingly pissed-off leadfoot trucker.
1971's Duel premiered as part of US television network ABC's Movie of the Week series, which ran from 1969 to 1975, and then had a theatrical run in 1983 with the inclusion of several scenes filmed after its broadcast. With a budget of just $450 000, Steven Spielberg made his feature debut count. Working from Richard Matheson's adaptation of his own story, Duel is unusually grim for Spielberg and the plot is indeed rather thin, but I was nonetheless riveted with Weaver the entire way down every road the story took him down. None of Steven's now-iconic and familiar collaborators (composer John Williams, editor Michael Kahn and cinematographers Allen Daviau and Janusz Kaminski) worked on this but with all due respect to them, that makes no difference.
Inevitably, it has some glaringly dated elements (most obviously the vehicles and payphones Mann uses en route), but the action is so confidently and rollickingly handled that you'd think a director twice his age had made it. Duel has been called the best made-for-TV film ever, and it helped to set its young director on his own road - to a legendary filmmaking career.
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