DUEL: Pure Nasty Screaming Cinematic Bliss

Every other day leading up to the release of his new movie Bridge of Spies, we will be dissecting a film in Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. I've picked ten movies spanning the length of Spielberg's career, five of which I have seen and five of which I haven't. Today we look at Duel, the DTV spectacular that catapulted Spielberg onto the filmmaking scene.

Other Reviews in this Series: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Empire of the Sun, Amistad, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, Munich, Lincoln

Other Spielberg Reviews: Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Bridge of Spies

(If you haven't already, check out my new archive over there ---->)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Richard Matheson
Cast: Dennis Weaver
Runtime: 90 mins.
1971

Duel, shot in just over a dozen days, is a low-budget direct-to-television movie about a tractor-trailer that terrorizes an everyman protagonist in his little red car. Nothing about that description sounds auspicious, or even vaguely desirable, unless you're of the sort who deliberately seeks out B-movie schlock. Thankfully, that misleading description lacked the movie's two most important ingredients: Duel was written by Richard Matheson and directed by Steven Spielberg.