Review by : NY TIMES
STEVEN SPIELBERG first made his mark with a film about a diabolical truck, a subject that would seem to have only limited possibilities. In fact, Mr. Spielberg’s 1971 television film ”Duel” took advantage of the very narrowness of its premise, building excitement from the most minimal ingredients and the simplest of situations. The theatrical version of ”Duel” at the Manhattan Twin theater may contain a few extra close-ups of its leading man’s nose, but otherwise it works as well on the wide screen as it did on the small one. Even without benefit of hindsight, ”Duel” looks like the work of an unusually talented young director.
”Duel” begins when a California businessman embarks on a car trip and happens to pass a certain truck on a two-lane road. The truck, which seems to have a mind of its own (the driver is never clearly seen), wants revenge and spends the rest of the journey getting it. The trip, which is a succession of nerve-wracking chases (truck gets behind car and forces it to speed up; truck gets in front of car and tries to force it off the road; truck butts car into path of oncoming train, etc.), was indeed a long one. According to the production notes, Dennis Weaver, who plays the car’s driver, put in more than 2,000 miles during the 16-day shooting schedule.
”Duel” might almost have been a silent film, because it expresses so much through action and so little through the words that are here. Mr. Weaver is David Mann, the film’s only real character, and he’s given a few internal monologues that only awkwardly express Mann’s anxiety. (After one encounter with the truck, he thinks: ”Twenty, twenty-five minutes out of your whole life and then all the ropes that kept you hangin’ in there are cut loose. And there you are, back in the jungle again.”)
These and a few whimsical conversations from a call-in radio show are really all the character development the movie provides, and they’re much weaker than the ingenious visual effects. Mr. Spielberg wasn’t purely a special-effects director in those days, and he isn’t one now, but the people in ”Duel” seem particularly remote. The minor characters, at the various stops Mann makes along the highway, are uniformly freakish. And Mann himself is shown to be a henpecked husband who regains his masculinity only through the contest on the road. Incidentally, his children are seen (when Mann makes a telephone call to his wife) playing raptly with a toy robot at home while their parents quarrel.
Mr. Weaver is the film’s ostensible leading man, but his responses are seldom complex or surprising. The vehicles are the real stars of ”Duel,” and whenever the chase is interrupted by the relatively primitive people on hand (at a truck stop and, in one particularly odd sequence, at a gas station run by a woman who keeps pet snakes, spiders and lizards), the film loses its momentum and becomes somewhat clumsy. The ending is abrupt, too, but the main impression left by ”Duel” is one of talent and energy. Mr. Spielberg seemed, with this film, to be headed for bigger and better things. Sure enough, he was.
