Steven Spielberg Transcended the TV Movie With Engine-Roaring Thrills in Duel

From 1969 to 1975, ABC put out weekly films. They functioned as TV pilots, testing grounds for up-and-coming filmmakers, and places for new and old stars to shine. Every month, Chloe Walker revisits one of these movies. This is Movie of the Week (of the Month).

Hard as it may be to believe now, Steven Spielberg had to battle to get his ABC Movie of the Week gig.

When his secretary showed him a Richard Matheson short story in an issue of Playboy, Spielberg knew it was a movie. He wanted to direct it. But in 1971, he’d just had a handful of TV director jobs, including the pilot of Columbo, which was still in post-production. With little else to his name at the time, he showed the rough cut to ABC producer George Eckstein. In an Empire interview with Edgar Wright, Spielberg remembers that though Eckstein liked it, he didn’t have the pull to hire him. “All I can do is support you with the network”, he said.

Thankfully, both for Spielberg and cinema history, that did the trick.

The story of Duel, Spielberg’s feature length directorial debut, could hardly be more simple. Travelling salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) is on his way to a meeting when he overtakes a huge gas truck. The driver of that truck takes offense. From then on, it’s Mann versus machine, as David does everything he can to stop the truck from running him off the road, to his death.

Although Spielberg was new to the game, he had some old pros on his team. Duel was written by the legendary Matheson, who, besides such genre classics as The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Pit and the Pendulum, scribed some of the very best ABC MOTWs – The Morning After, Trilogy of Terror, The Stranger Within, Dying Room Only, and The Night Stalker. Based on a terrifying tailgating incident he’d lived through himself, Matheson’s screenplay provided Duel its sleek, propulsive engine.

And literally at the wheel was Dennis Weaver, at the time known for his roles on beloved TV westerns like Gunsmoke and Kentucky Jones, with ABC MOTWs Female Artillery and Rolling Man still in his future.

Throughout the movie, all we see of the gas truck driver is the bottom of a pair of cowboy boots, and an unnerving hand out the window, waving David past. In an almost fantastical way, it’s the gas truck itself that becomes his nemesis – its smoking chimney-like exhaust and growling engine giving the terrifying impression of sentience (in fact, some today still wonder if it was a demon). With his foe lacking a face, and the other personae merely bit players, Weaver is charged solely with giving Duel its human center. He does one hell of a job.

David is a sweaty, terrified, desperate man, with nothing on his mind but the frantic struggle to stay alive. The lack of varnish in Weaver’s turn makes it easy for viewers to put themselves in his position – because he comes across as so very ordinary, the furthest thing possible from a traditional action hero, we root for him the way we would for ourselves. That he’s usually the only one on screen highlights Weaver’s prowess in finding new facets to David’s sticky, palpating fear; even with no-one else to play against except an enormous truck, he commands our attention the whole way through.

Then there was the prodigious stewardship and ingenuity of the 24 year-old Spielberg. Matheson’s taut screenplay and Weaver’s engrossing performance allowed Spielberg to concentrate on the task of visual storytelling; an avowed fan of silent cinema, he actually fought to get even more dialogue cut from the already sparse script. Duel is a movie of indelible images: the beckoning arm of the mysterious driver hanging out the window, the truck shunting David’s bright red Plymouth Valiant towards a speeding train, and later suddenly appearing behind him in a phone booth as he’s calling for help. All these images are larger than life, yet disconcertingly tangible. Scenes from a waking nightmare.