Duel (1971, Steven Spielberg) (Patreon)

76/100

A star is born. I'm not quite old enough to have (knowingly*) seen this when it originally aired on ABC—my first Spielberg experience was Close Encounters, which came out when I was nine—but had I been an adult cinephile in 1971, and had a time traveler from the future informed me that the kid who directed Duel will subsequently become the most commercially successful filmmaker of all time, breaking box-office records left and right, my reaction (to that specific remark**) would have been "Yeah, that sounds about right." Road footage anticipates George Miller's vehicular virtuosity, demonstrating dazzling formal creativity on a ridiculously tight schedule and low budget; Spielberg admittedly has to lean a bit hard on shots of the speedometer to convey velocity—it generally looks through the windshield like the Valiant is doing 45 when it's meant to be doing 80 or 90—but he makes up for it with unerringly judicious setups that exhaust almost every conceivable angle from which a moving car and truck can be photographed, always clearly conceived with an eye toward how they'll cut together. Even small, insignificant moments have been assembled with remarkable care and visual dexterity: When Mann pulls out of the gas station/laundromat early on, a shot of the Valiant driving toward the camera, with Weaver's face growing larger in the frame as he approaches, quickly dissolves to a shot of Weaver's eyes in the car's rear-view mirror, and the angles and backgrounds and focus are all aligned so perfectly that it almost looks continuous.  Striking and effective without being the least bit flashy, like everything else in this brutally efficient thriller. Perfectly suits the elemental nature of the film’s meaningless conflict, which is credible enough to be truly unnerving. (I once so angered some dude by passing him on a lengthy single-lane road near where I live—not cutting him off, mind you, just passing him because he was driving too slowly, same deal as here—that he actually followed me all the way to my house and then parked outside for several minutes, engine running, I guess just to scare me. I was mostly concerned that he'd come back and slash my tires or something—should've had the presence of mind not to go home, since I could see that he was tailing me—but nothing ever happened.)

Ideally, Duel would have been dialogue-free, or as close to wordless as All Is Lost got. Partly that's because Weaver (much more than Redford) is an actor of limited skill, and giving him lines does him no favors. Mostly, though, it's because the film works best as a pure expression of power dynamics, which in this case are represented by sheer mass. As Gloria Estefan reminds us, words get in the way. I don't mind Mann occasionally talking aloud at the rig early on—that's something almost everyone does behind the wheel when exasperated with another driver—but Matheson's use of voiceover to provide us with Mann's thoughts ranges from clumsy ("The highway's all yours, Jack. I'm not budging for at least an hour. Maybe the police will pull you in by then") to just abysmal ("He has to be crazy. Okay, so he's crazy. What can I do about it? Find him a psychiatrist?"). It's sparingly employed, thank god, but nearly ruins the otherwise tense sequence at Chuck's Café, and for no good reason—Spielberg's camera, darting from eyes to boots to the view outside the window, gives us all the information we need. Also wish that the theatrical version hadn't been slightly compromised by the tyranny of the 90-minute runtime (which I guess must have kicked in when first-run double-features went extinct). Loved the absence of any pro forma business at the outset "establishing" who Mann is, and was disappointed when he later calls his wife and we get some unimportant exposition—a scene that I've now learned doesn't exist in the original TV cut and constitutes simple padding. Though, even here, we get a superb shot of Weaver framed through the open glass door of a washing machine, partially obscured by the arm of the otherwise unseen woman who's unloading it. That alone would have made me sit up and take notice, had this been my first Spielberg film instead of (for the moment***) my last. 

* Needlessly covering my ass here because I was alive at the time and it's possible that my dad watched it—Duel is totally his kind of movie—with me on his lap or something. But I would have been three.

** Needlessly covering my ass here because I'd likely have some additional reactions were I to encounter a time traveler from the future.

*** Needlessly covering my ass here so that I'm not a suspect should Spielberg be murdered before he finishes West Side Story.