Duel (1971 film)
Summary
"Terror in your rear view mirror." A business commuter is pursued and terrorized by the malevolent driver of a massive tractor-trailer.
Details
- Release Date: 1971
- Country/Language: US, English
- Genres/Technical: Action, Thriller, made-for-TV
- Setting: 1970s California USA
- Runtime: 1 hr 31 min
- Starring: Dennis Weaver
- Director: Steven Spielberg
- Writer: Richard Matheson
- Producer/Production Co: ABC, Universal Television
- View Trailer: (link)
- TVTropes: (link)
- IMDB Page: (link)
Ratings
MPAA Ratings
- Rated: PG (Violence, mild Profanity)
Tentacle Ratings
A rough measure of how "Lovecraftian" the work is:
- s____ (One Half Tentacle: More or Less Non-Lovecraftian)
Duel has no real direct connection with Lovecraft's work, though the screenplay by Richard Matheson (no stranger to vaguely Lovecraftian storytelling) does manage to lend the tanker truck, all black with tinted windows and no evidence of a human driver, an aura of nameless, irrational, elemental menace in common with some of Lovecraft's nightmarish horrors. Duel is, in a way, a Lovecraftian conflict against vast, faceless, nameless horrors from the outer realms, portrayed in miniature as a struggle between one man alone in the desert against an irrational and reasonless machine driven by the unknown and unknowable.
Note: This rating is not intended as a measure of quality, merely of how closely related to Lovecraftian "Weird" fiction the work is.
Reviews
Review Links:
- The Movie Vault, (link) - "...an early depiction of road rage... ...it makes the truck the villain... Although rather slow paced this movie is rather good at building suspense."
- Scott Ashlin at 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting (4/5 Stars) (link) - "There’s a good chance that Duel is the best horror movie ever made for American TV. The sheer efficiency of it is breathtaking; barely a second is wasted anywhere, and there isn’t a single scene or minor secondary character that isn’t somehow necessary to maintaining the mood of escalating panic or keeping the story in motion. ... And Spielberg’s decision never to reveal the mad trucker’s face is a masterstroke. ...the truck itself takes on a sinister sort of life."
- Richard Scheib at the Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (5/5 Stars), (link) - "Spielberg introduces a non-human antagonist that symbolically emerges out of the blue and smashes through the placid lives of his everyman protagonists... Like every good horror film, this is a picture of normality only waiting for the intrusion of the inexplicable to turn it on its head... The fact that the driver is never identified is significant. Some cinema reference works have been happy to pigeonhole Duel as a science-fiction film – the fact that the truck’s driver is rarely seen making for an obvious man-vs-machine allegory. This seems to be missing the point. In seeing Duel, it becomes a difficult case to maintain – the driver is clearly seen silhouetted in the cab.... Certainly, the Man vs Machine analogy rears up over the film but it is only a metaphor and Duel reads as a standard psychological thriller in every other way. It is a metaphor Richard Matheson is not unaware of... By the end, with the truck going over the cliff in slow-motion accompanied by a bestial roar and Dennis Weaver’s eventual reduction to non-verbal grunts as he conducts a dance of triumph, Steven Spielberg and Richard Matheson have symbolically stripped Mann to the point he is caveman fighting a primitive leviathan... [Spielberg withholds] any explanation for the grueling assaults... the very lack of an explanation behind the assault creates a sense of overwhelming anxiety."
Synopsis (SPOILERS)
Spoiler Section (Highlight to Read)
In a story apparently inspired by an incident of "road rage" experienced by the writer, a commuter on a desert highway is suddenly terrorized by the anonymous driver of a huge tanker truck, with aggressive driving escalating to a duel to the death.
Notes
Comments, Trivia, Dedication
Associated Mythos Elements
- TO DO
Keeper Notes
- There can be some power in punctuating super-natural or super-scientific alien threats from "the Mythos" with more ambiguous, and less obvious threats, suggesting a truly hostile universe where the investigators can be menaced personally, by the almost invisibly mundane, for no apparent rational reason at all. Between investigations, the investigators encounter danger from out of nowhere in the form of a black tanker truck (or other menacing but common vehicle or large animal suitable to the era) with no apparent human element in control, forcing them into a life-or-death struggle with little chance to reason with it; the assaults seem personal, but in the end there is no real explanation for the aggression at all.
