DUEL: It’s like ‘Jaws’ on Wheels

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Every great director gets their start somewhere. For Steven Spielberg, it was the 1971 Made-for-TV movie ‘Duel‘. A killer truck tracks down the hero of the movie in a kill crazy rampage. It’s just like strapping 18 wheels to the belly of a shark! What ‘Jaws‘ did for the ocean ‘Duel‘ did for evil highway truckers. Our friends from B&S About Movies love horror movies, and here’s their review.

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Duel (1971)

April 18, 2023 by R.D Francis

In ‘Duel‘ the ABC Movie of the Week series for November 13, 1971 — and later an international release in theaters — he’s just a businessman in a Plymouth Valiant who upsets the driver — never seen — of a 1955 Peterbilt 281 18-wheeler. It sounds so simple, but that’s what makes it work. There’s little dialogue in the movie with the car and truck pretty much speaking for themselves, as was the intention of its director, a young Steven Spielberg, making his first full-length film.

Spielberg requested Denis Weaver, as he loved him in ‘Touch of Evil‘ and even has him use a line from that Orson Welles movie, as he tells the truck driver that he has “…another thing coming…”

If you see a version with swearing and more talking, that’s because Universal paid the director to pad it for theatrical release. As for that sound — it seems like a dinosaur — that the truck makes when it dies, it’s the same sound as the shark at the end of the blockbuster Spielberg would later make. He’s said that there is a kinship between the two movies, which are about monsters threatening normal people and the sound effect being used again was “my way of thanking Duel for giving me a career.” It comes from the 1957 movie ‘The Land Unknown‘.

The other reason this works so well is because of the script by Richard Matheson. He based it on a real story from his life, as a truck tried to run him off the road after a round of golf with Jerry Sohl on the day that JFK was killed. He tried to sell it as a movie for eight years before selling it as a short story to Playboy, where it was published in April 1971. Spielberg said of him, “Richard Matheson’s ironic and iconic imagination created seminal science-fiction stories and gave me my first break when he wrote the short story and screenplay for Duel. For me, he is in the same category as Bradbury and Asimov.”

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Would have made a great 30 minute episode of The Twilight Zone, but in our opinion at Demara Racing, the story drags out at feature film length.

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