In a DVD bonus feature on the 30th-anniversary edition of his 1975 horror masterpiece Jaws, director Steven Spielberg compared the movie to his debut feature Duel, a made-for-TV suspense thriller about a driver being pursued by a mysterious truck. Spielberg noted that both Jaws and Duel are about “leviathans targeting everymen.”
Indeed, both Jaws and Duel center around relatable everymen who are chased by a relentless monster. While the monster in each movie is very different – in Jaws, it’s a shark, and in Duel, it’s a tractor-trailer – the same craft, precision, and Spielbergian tension can be seen in both.
Adapted from the Richard Matheson short story of the same name (by Matheson himself), Duel stars Dennis Weaver as David Mann, a businessman driving through the California desert on his way to an important meeting. After a minor road-rage incident with the unseen driver of a tractor-trailer, David spends the rest of the movie being mercilessly pursued and terrorized. When the movie first aired on ABC in 1971, it received positive reviews from critics who highlighted Spielberg’s direction as the reason for its success.
Spielberg helmed two more made-for-TV thrillers – 1972’s Something Evil and 1973’s Savage – before finally making his theatrical debut with lovers-on-the-run road movie The Sugarland Express. After that, he made Jaws, which became the highest-grossing movie of all time, the template for half a century’s worth of high-concept blockbusters, and the first of many groundbreaking hits to Spielberg’s name.
His comparison between Duel and Jaws is an interesting one. The movies are nothing alike, but they do share the core theme of a regular guy taking on a destructive force much more powerful than himself. Jaws was the movie that changed Hollywood, but Duel was the movie that put Spielberg on the industry’s radar. It’s entirely possible that Universal hired Spielberg to direct Jaws on the basis that a truck out for blood and a shark out for blood are essentially the same thing. If he can use a camera and a pair of scissors to make an advancing tractor-trailer terrifying, he can do the same for an advancing great white.
Weaver’s performance as David in Duel has a lot in common with Roy Scheider’s turn as Chief Brody in Jaws. They’re both quintessential everymen. Both characters are humanized by being loving family men – David calls his wife from the road; Brody makes faces with his son at the dinner table – and they both share the character flaw of working too much.
Neither Brody nor David is a traditional heroic protagonist. Brody is more of a man of action than David, but he’s afraid of the water, he’s easily intimidated by the mayor and his cronies, and he shies away from showing off his one little scar when Hooper and Quint are comparing their gruesome wounds. In Duel, when David notices that the truck is parked at the diner where he’s eating, David decides to profusely apologize to the driver to offset any possible altercation and nervously runs through various scenarios in his head before ultimately chickening out. This isn’t just a character who’s afraid of violent confrontations; he’s afraid of any kind of confrontation. He’s not a Hollywood hero; he’s just a mild-mannered businessman on his way to a meeting.
Like Mad Max: Fury Road, Duel is essentially a feature-length car chase. The premise of a scorned truck driver chasing a timid businessman is a beautifully simplistic yet fiercely effective setup for a thriller, and the story delivers on it. Matheson’s screenplay is constantly raising the stakes with inventive situations drawn from the juicy concept. David is always in new kinds of danger. At one point, the truck runs him off the road. When he tries to call the police from a phone booth, the trucker smashes right through the phone booth, leaving a surprised David with a split-second to jump out of the way. With moments like this, Spielberg makes the truck an unforgettable movie monster.
Being a movie-of-the-week intended for TV broadcast, Duel had a seriously limited budget and production schedule compared to a theatrical feature. But Spielberg works with what he has: two moving vehicles, a big open road, and a camera. Filmmaking tricks are free. Spielberg and his editor Frank Morriss cut to tighter and tighter close-ups to build tension. Low-angle shots locked onto the radiator grille of the speeding truck make it a suitably ominous on-screen presence. Thanks to the way it’s framed, the truck feels terrifyingly larger-than-life despite being shot for the small screen.
Spielberg later used the same tactic of using what was available to him when Jaws went over its budget, over its schedule, and the mechanical shark broke. The director had to feature the shark less than he planned to, but reducing its screen time ended up being what made the movie such a timeless horror masterpiece.
Less is more, and Spielberg left a lot of Jaws’ grisly action to the audience’s imagination using Hitchcockian suspense-building techniques. An entire pier being dragged along the surface of the water is more frightening than any money shot of a shark swimming in the ocean, because it tells the audience how big and powerful this shark is without actually showing them the monster. Recent horror movies like A Quiet Place have been let down by showing the monsters in too much detail. In Jaws, the shark has approximately four minutes of screen time. Spielberg used his monster sparingly, so it makes a huge impact every time it appears on-screen.
Duel doesn’t use this technique, because its premise leans more on the action side of the thriller genre than the horror side, and in the action genre, more is more. The truck is a pervasive presence, pestering David in as many frames as possible. Here, Spielberg creates tension by bringing the truck closer and closer to David’s hopeless little suburban car.
The vehicular action in Duel has the same razor-sharp clarity that would go on to make the action sequences in the Indiana Jones movies so memorable. It’s always clear exactly how close the truck is, how dangerous the terrain is, and what David is doing in a desperate bid to escape. Spielberg masterfully builds to an explosive finale that would’ve blown audiences away if it had been released on the big screen.