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

Steven Spielberg Transcended the TV Movie With Engine-Roaring Thrills in Duel
Listen to this article

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.

ABC pushed for soundstage filming, but Spielberg knew that this was a story that needed the air of the wide open road, and so it was shot against the vast backdrop of a California desert highway. With diners and gas stations peppered along the way, it was the first real taste of the mythic Americana that would permeate the entire career of one of the greatest directors to ever pick up a megaphone.

And people liked what they saw. The widespread critical praise garnered Duel the rarest of opportunities for a MOTW: a theatrical release, albeit across Europe and Asia, not the U.S. To bring the film’s televisual 74 minutes up to a more cinematic 90, Spielberg and Weaver shot a few more sequences, most notably the sublimely framed scene where David has a phone conversation with his wife at a laundromat, and David coming across a broken down school bus whilst the truck is still hot on his heels. The likelihood is, if you watch Duel today, it’s the theatrical version you’ll be seeing, and it’s still striking how smoothly these scenes fit into the flow of the action.

As it had on its original TV broadcast, Duel received widespread acclaim from its theatrical run, setting the director on the path toward becoming who he is today. Ironically, when it did at last get a theatrical release in the U.S. in 1983 – after Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. – it barely made an impact at the box office. It had already done its job.

More than any other, Duel is frequently referred to as “the best TV movie of all time”. Clearly, that is a subjective statement; a more objective take would be to call it the most cinematic. If you didn’t know that it started life as a MOTW, there’s nothing there that would clue you in.

It’s somewhat counterintuitive how the standard bearer for small screen films earned its place by seeming to belong on the big. Though the most visually interesting productions we’ve discussed in this series – A Cold Night’s Death, Haunts of the Very Rich – used their TV movie budgets to smart, evocative effect, they weren’t able to disguise them in the way that Duel did. Watching today, it seems glaringly clear where Spielberg’s destiny lay.

Yet in another sense, that makes Duel a prime example of the bracing variety a viewer could expect when they tuned in to the ABC MOTW.

There were 257 in all – romantic comedies and westerns, heist movies and disaster movies, a panoply of thrillers and horrors. There were early works by soon-to-be superstars, and there were the swansongs of past legends. Films that were ahead of their time, and those that were very much of it. There were those shot like a standard episode of a weekly sitcom, and those that used their limited budget in wildly creative, cinematic ways. That you never knew what you were going to get was what made it all so exciting. Half a century later, diving through the many prints of a varying quality sitting on YouTube right now, or the handful that have been restored over the years, that joy of discovery is still there, ready and waiting.

Duel is the twenty-eighth and final edition of the MOTW(OTM). That still leaves more than 220 for you to dive into yourself. I hope you have as fun a time exploring that unique, fascinating back catalogue as I have.


Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.

 
Join the discussion...