Directed by Steven Spielberg, based on a story by Richard Matheson and starring Dennis Weaver this film was made in 1971 and is 90 minutes long.

Mini synopsis :

"On a road in California, a travelling salesman is chased by a huge truck. Oh, but it is so much more ..........."

"Duel's" loglines from the IMDB :

• A duel is about to begin between a man, a truck, and an open road.
• Where a simple battle of wits is now a matter of life and death.
• Fear is the driving force.
• The Killer's Weapon - A 40 Ton Truck
• Terror in your rear view mirror.
• When the headlights of a truck become the eyes of a psychopath.
• The most bizarre murder weapon ever used!

Facts :

• "Duel" was Steven Spielberg's first film. It was planned as a TV movie but after its success on ABC in November of 1971 a slightly longer version was distributed with even greater success to cinemas.
• The cinema version won the first ever Festival du Film Fantastique d'Avoriaz in 1973.
• Filming began on 13 September 1971 and lasted 13 days.
• Editing was completed in early October.

• The shoot took place northeast of Los Angeles.

CHUCK'S CAFE

Before I get to the film.....

I've read that "Chuck's Cafe" still exists and at some point was known as a restaurant called The French Oak and is located a few miles from Acton.

If anybody knows this building and what it is now - please let me know and send a photo if possible.

A Car being Chased by a Truck

"Duel" is consistent with what was to follow from Spielberg. By adding internal reflection as a monologue he created what was considered at the time to be a surprising and spectacular auteur film. The experience for the viewer is powerful, nightmarish.

On paper this film about a car being chased by a truck sounds utterly boring - but translated to celluloid it is thoroughly compelling. This success is due in large part to the very interesting collaboration between a young director and an established screenplay writer.

Richard Matheson was already a master of the art of fantastic narrative. By adapting one of his own short stories for Speilberg to film, Matheson, the author of "The Shrinking Man" (filmed as "The Incredible Shrinking Man"), I Am Legend" (which he adapted into 3 films : "The Last Man on Earth", "The Omega Man" and "I Am Legend") and the best episodes of "The Fourth Dimension", chose a story that would seem particularly difficult to adapt into images.

The story of a car driver being chased by a trucker, albeit a somewhat demonic lorry driver, is more than thin - it's positively minimal. There are hardly any characters and only one type of action - the chase. Yet this pursuit of the salesman in his car by the trucker is now legendary and the filmic interpretation benefits from the freedom which came with the physical distance between the production location and the influence of Universal Studios and also because the production costs were very low.

A Film "Noir"

Spielberg filmed the duel between the driver and the truck as though he was making a western : the setting, in the middle of nowhere, is arid and dusty. It has the look of a movie by Sergio Leone. The duel between the lone man and the diabolical machine takes place under an unrelenting, burning sun and along endless roads. Just like the western movie allegory of a man rediscovering life after crossing a desert.

"Duel" is a "film noir”. Beyond violence, it is completely suicidal in both spirit and concept. It is virtually a silent movie with barely forty lines of dialogue. The dislocation of the viewer is enhanced because the driver of the truck is poorly shot due to the bright sunlight which made it impossible to get a clear picture of him through the window of his truck.

The verbal silence and the unseen trucker are important to the final product.

"Duel" recalls another experimental film from the same year -"THX 113" the only film George Lucas ever wrote and directed that will and should be remembered as a mostly artistic triumph rather than a largely financial one.

Ultimately, "Duel" is proof of the mastery of cinematic wonder. The film is considered less perfect than the short story but only because of the inclusion of the wife of the main character. However, with "Duel", Spielberg passed his first directorial test with flying colors. The film is proof that at 25 years old he had a precise conception of how films should be made. The cinomatographic adventures of Spielberg had just begun ...

Man(n) versus Machine

The protagonist of the film is David Mann, the salesman driver of the Plymouth Valiant and the antagonist is the nameless, sinister and mysterious lorry driver or more accurately the truck that he's driving. This is a grimy tanker truck known as a Peterbilt 281. "Duel" is about their confrontation, a battle of modern knights, a metaphysical allegory on the nature of being.

David Mann is an ordinary man – the archtypal 'everyman'. He is married, has a profession, and maintains throughout the film several social relationships with secondary characters. Dennis Weaver was the perfect choice to play an average American. Spielberg portrays the action continuously from Mann's point of view, which emphasizes the character and increases the tendency of the viewer to identify with him.

The trucker is the polar opposite of Mann. First, his face never appears on the screen, only his legs or his arms are occasionally visible. The character is indefinable: nobody knows who he is or what his motives are. A mystery hangs over his identity. This non-identity of the trucker is ultimately what makes the truck itself into Mann's real opponent.

During the course of the film the truck is endowed small personalising effects which collectively highlight that it, and not it's driver, is the antagonist. Even Mann, in his occasional contact with minor characters, stops talking about a truck driver trying to kill him and talks about the truck instead. In the end we hear the noise of the truck as a roar, as if it were a real monster of flesh and blood, a sort of rabid predator. In retrospect, the truck from "Duel" evokes both the great white shark of Jaws and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.

The Secondary Characters

The role of the truck is made more effective and menacing because it is dirty, dented, rusted and imposing. The many license plates hung on the bumpers are like scalps torn from his 'victims'.

The confrontation between the truck and the driver requires two readings of the film: from an ideological point of view, the fight boils down to that of man and machine but in psychoanalytic terms it is a fight between the ego and it's sense of repression.

The secondary characters provide heightened dramatic narrative. The scenes with the children and the old woman add depth to both David Mann's point of view and the menace of the truck.

Meanwhile, the desert as a secondary character plays a very different role - it isolates the protagonist and antagonist, often containing them in the same camera shot. The desert also serves to highlight both the brutality and the futility of their interaction.

The presence of animals - the tarantulas and rattlesnakes – emphasises the brutality of the confrontation which has become a ruthless fight for survival. The allegory is powerful : Mann must use both his latent animal instincts and his humanity if he is going to defeat his opponent. In combining human and animal characteristics in a single protagonist, the ending of "Duel" recalls the opening of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film “2001 : A Space Odyssey” in which a monkey discovers his latent humanity.

Not Bad for a First Film

“Duel” was initially a television production which meant that Spielberg had limited technical and financial resources. As a result the sets are natural, props and accessories rare and the actors, apart from Dennis Weaver, are relatively unknown. Yet it is precisely because of this lack of resources that Spielberg managed to make an exciting film from a story that a priori only works on paper.

Working on the basis that it is difficult to express the internal psychological landscape of a character, Spielberg drew the force of this film out of the clarity of the course of action and its emotional impact on the viewer.

With the exception of the sequence in Chuck's Cafe in which voice over is used, Spielberg uses the most basic of film makers' tools - editing, cutting and montage to create the tensions and conflicts in “Duel”. He succeeds in creating a dynamic and unrestrained narrative - and, although to modern audiences used to extravagant special effects, “Duel” may be tense but not spectacular – in 1971 it provided true cinematic shock.

A whirlwind of images and sounds is superimposed on to the confrontation between Mann and the machine. Quick cuts between scenes and multiple, often disturbing, camera angles add to the disconcerting viewing experience. As does the sheer fracas of sound caused by car and truck engines, horns, brakes, passing trains, skidding and the car radio. This soundtrack – which at times is frenzied – embeds the antagonism which is inherent in the story into the very fabric of the film. The action is not only represented in images and sounds, but is subliminally engaged by their refining connections.

The action of "Duel" is not merely a car chase, but from a cinematographic viewpoint, a captivating movie experience.

Steven Spielberg is now a relative unknown of course ......

The Vehicles

David Mann's Plymouth Valiant

Year: 1970
Make: Plymouth
Model: Valiant Custom
Engine: Gasoline 318 cid V8
Price When New: $2800
Top Speed: 116 Mph
Fuel Economy: 16 City/21 Highway
0-60mph: 8.0 seconds
1/4 Mile: 15.9 seconds @ 92 mph
Body Style: 4 Door/6 Passenger
Transmission: Column Shift TorqueFlite 904a 3 Speed Automatic

The Truck

Year: 1955-1960 Series
Make: Peterbilt
Model: 351
Engine: Cummins NHBS Supercharged 6 Cylinder Diesel
Price When New: $8900(estimate)
Horsepower: 275 Gross @ 2400 RPM
Top Speed: 90 Mph (estimated)
Fuel Economy: 9 mpg city/11 mpg highway (unloaded)
0-60mph: 28 seconds (unloaded)
1/4 Mile: Do you really want to know? Its bad...
Body Style: Conventional Cab/2 passenger

The " Duel" Screenplay

Click HERE to get a complimentary copy of the "Duel" screenplay before watching the film which you will find below in it's entirety.