Duel (1971) - film review

David Mann is driving his red Plymouth Valiant through the California desert on his way to a business meeting.  The only other vehicle on the otherwise empty highway is a lumbering tanker truck which is expelling noxious black exhaust fumes in his direction.  When Mann overtakes the truck, he is surprised when it suddenly accelerates and overtakes him, before slowing down again.  Mann overtakes the truck a second time, but as he does so, the driver of the truck gives him a fierce horn blast.  Again the truck speeds up and Mann has no choice but to let it pass him.  Again the truck slows down and Mann’s impatience compels him to try to overtake it, but as he does so he almost runs straight into a car passing in the opposite direction.  Mann suddenly realises what is happening.  The truck driver is drawing him in a dangerous game of cat and mouse, a game that will quickly become a duel to the death...

For his feature debut, director Steven Spielberg succeeded in crafting a minimalist suspense masterpiece that surpasses virtually all of his subsequent work in its economy, inventiveness and sheer cinematographic brilliance.  Although originally made for US television, the film was so well-received that it was given an international theatrical release a few years later (with a few additional sequences).  Today it is regarded as one of Spielberg’s greatest achievements and a cult film in the horror/thriller genre.

Based on a short story by Richard Matheson (who also wrote the film’s screenplay), Duel has a narrative simplicity which both belies and accentuates its rich symbolic complexity.  The film can be interpreted in many ways – as an allegory of man’s attempt to gain mastery over soulless machines in an increasingly technological age, as an existentialist nightmare in which the appropriately named Mr Mann seeks to assert his identity on a barren universe or just a study on the psychology of road rage.

No matter how you interpret it, Duel is an extraordinarily compelling work, one that grabs you by the throat in a vice-like grip and does not let go until the closing credits.  Its homage to Hitchcock is apparent in the subjective camerawork, which effectively builds the tension to an almost unbearable pitch, and the eerie score, which appears to have been inspired by Bernard Herrmann’s music from the shower scene in Psycho.

The fact that the identity of the truck driver is never revealed lends an enigmatic, mystical quality to the film, making it both hauntingly poetic and genuinely disturbing.  There is something terrifyingly primal in the game that the two protagonists – Mann and the truck - indulge in, something dark and bestial which is hard to reconcile with our supposedly civilised notions of behaviour and morality.  It is the baser emotions – fear and pride – that consume Mann and ensnare him in a fight to the bitter end against his faceless enemy.  Fear and pride – the same emotions that led America into the futile and seemingly interminable war with Vietnam.  Is this what Duel is ultimately about – a coded diatribe on the absurdity of a doomed military adventure?

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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