Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2576 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-03-28
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 86 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
This is the TV movie that put Steven Spielberg on the map, shortly before he made The Sugarland Express. Working from a script by Richard Matheson, the film stars Dennis Weaver as a mild-mannered traveling salesman who unintentionally angers the driver of a semi truck. Suddenly, the truck is not only riding his tail but trying to run him off the road. No matter what he does (pulling over, stopping at a diner, calling the cops), he can't get rid of it. Spielberg makes the wise decision of never showing the driver, even as he cranks the voltage on the film's suspense elements. As a result, the truck itself takes on an air of satanic menace--even a personality of sorts--as it seems to hunt its human prey. Spielberg made a lot out of a little, suggesting just how skilled a storyteller he would become. --Marshall Fine

Customer Reviews

Spielberg's simplest and most effective thriller?
Spielberg directed this TV movie for ABC when he was 23 and it is the essence of 'high concept' film - man terrorised on desert highway by truck. It is testament to Duel's effectiveness that it was later theatrically released.

Duel is a relentlessly gripping game of cat-and-mouse between a terrified Dennis Weaver in his red Sedan, and the malevolent driver of a monstrous, greasy truck. That the truck has a driver at all is almost irrelevant. The cab windows of that vehicle are rarely in shot, instead Spielberg focuses on the small headlights and prominent engine grille - the truck's beady eyes and vicious snout. Those features are most threatening when shot at low-level as the truck gains speed on Weaver.

This fatalistic game begins when Weaver tries to overtake the truck in a hurry to make a meeting in California. He has already been framed as a man in a mediocre job with a loveless family life. His impotence is reinforced in one of the film's most memorable scenes when Weaver struggles to assist a stuck school bus. In the distance the lights of the truck come on. As Weaver takes off terrified, the truck smoothly, deliberately moves the bus. It's more terrifying still that the driver has shown he is capable of compassion, but has chosen to play with Weaver's life, beckoning him into oncoming traffic, running him off the road, and edging him onto a rail track.

Weaver is excellent as the hunted man - his paranoia in a roadside café with the truck looming ominously in the background is intoxicating, accentuated by his nervy voice-over. His desperation when the truck pulls out from hidden spots is palpable, and his resolution to take a stand is sincere - understandable as Weaver did many of the stunts himself. His performance, with Speilberg's excellent direction, makes Duel a seminal example of an economical premise turned into a memorable, overwhelmingly edgy thriller.

An outstanding short but effective road thriller
A film like this where nothing much happens and no special effects is never going to appeal to everybody, obviously a lot of people will find this extremely boring but me personally, I can't give a better example of a fantastic movie where almost nothing happens as good as this little Steven Spielberg TV movie gem. I even question myself sometimes as to why I rate this so highly and think am I being laughed at here and was this some kind of joke by Steven Spielberg to see if he could fool people and was secretly thinking people will watch any old rubbish if you make them believe it is some kind of art movie. No, this was before he was even well known, why would he ruin his movie directing career before it has even began.

Like I said, I can totally understand that this won't be for everybody but I just love this type of filming, it almost moves along in realtime. It is Just another day for a businessman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) the same as every other, driving home in a hurry on his own in the blistering heat along a two way desert highway, suddenly there is a tank truck ahead of him, he gets irritated and overtakes it and then as before just driving along, suddenly the truck appears from nowhere and overtakes him but then slows down (this would irritate even the calmest person), a short while after he manages to overtake the truck again, the truck driver is not pleased at all but again he think's that is the end of it and it is back to his usual drive home. There is just one problem, it isn't the end of it, trust me David, it will be a long time before you get home.

I am not going to say another word about what happens next, if you have never seen this before and what I have just said sounds interesting, then I am sure you will love this, if it sounds very boring then you should probably avoid it like your worst film ever, but I would recommend that you make your own judgement because the performance from Dennis Weaver as businessman David Mann is superb, he doesn't need to say a word because his face says it all. AN OUTSTANDING ROAD THRILLER

Oh, Steven! Less is so much more
So here's an irony: Thirty-five years on, the movie audience which Spielberg's later work helped to capture - multiplex consumers of overblown CGI, gross-out, slapstick, and ever-greater explosions - may not "get" this one at all (e.g. see some of its other reviewers here). For anybody else - and this is most certainly not "art-house" either, don't be put off - here's an astounding, must-see thriller. OK, so it's a wannabe western, or Hitchcock (or Beowulf, or Alien, or High Noon) on wheels: None of that detracts from its great premise, which is delivered utterly without frills.

So many reasons to see this:

Spielberg is SO good at doing minimal (seriously, Steve, about time to get back to some of that?): Pared-down music, only natural-sound detail; no human baddie, just a perfectly cast truck as the anthropomorphised "killer". Even the shattering finale is captured on ordinary live film, albeit in one of the most awe-inspiring shots ever committed to celluloid.

Great raw material: OK, so of course the script dates just a bit, with what dialogue there is sounding TV-ish and a wee bit cheesy to the modern ear; and kids now seeing this film might snigger at the personal styling details and plot's obvious reliance on predating mobile phones; but hey... We're right there for Mann (Dennis Weaver) from the very start, as it's vital that we have to be, since his story is so discreetly and elegantly constructed.

And as a piece of performance: Not just by Weaver, in whom we completely believe as the put-upon everyman reluctantly forced to find his inner warrior. The film works because it sustains a gut-wrenching kinetic energy that few others ever reach (woeful comparison with, for example, the new Pirates III, which for all its frantic rushing about, quite fails to draw its audience into the action). DUEL trumps later blockbusters because the whole movie is shot "for real" - perhaps partly because the frantic pace of its actual production (see below) seems to rub off onto the screen. That it works at all is largely because it's propelled by uncannily perfect pacing of the on-the-road scenes, which (as Spielberg acknowledges) only happens when you get a perfect mix of the ingredients: obsessive planning of sequences; unobtrusively brilliant stunt driving; then-new moving camera techniques (including a contribution from Bullitt's road unit); and laser-sharp editing. That's not to overlook the out-of-car scenes, which have a gloriously welcome fingernails-down-the-blackboard inner screech of Hitchcockian suspense - best of all in the diner scene ("which one is him?"), complete with some hilariously dark 'red herring' moments; the snake farm; and the old couple who (with pitch-perfect Buchan / Hitchock irony) mistake Mann for an attacker.

Visuals: It's clear from the first frame that, as Fats Waller put it, "the gods are in the house". Details are pin-sharp, not just as to focal clarity, but as they layer up the metaphorical landscape of the story, with every single shot both perfectly framed and constantly informing character and/or building pace; and that's a lot of shots, often complex and kinetic ones. And all set in a serenely beautiful landscape, mocking the petty anxieties and feuds of the men and machines scuttling across it. All the more surprising therefore to find in the bonus material that DUEL was made in less than a month: just 13 days' shooting, including the 3 days of (ultimately unused) "spare plate" shots insisted on by the studio.

This DVD edition is deeply satisfying both for the transfer quality of the movie itself and for a joyous Spielberg interview. Refreshingly modest and candid, the director reveals his debt to a quick-witted PA, to his production team and actors, and how great achievement springs from being young and hungry. It's amusing by-the-by to see Spielberg look back on this period of coming to terms with the public impact of his own virtuosity, coming to realise how a seemingly minor movie shot in 13 days can outgrow its origins to signal his big breakthrough. (Among all the fascinating stuff about how to get a 50-mph lorry to go at 100 mph, he also, touchingly, points out a couple of minor rookie mistakes you might not otherwise have noticed.) Musing on the cultural impact that his astonishing debut piece had, stumbling upon a global audience, he notes that what started as simply a domestic "TV ratings Titanic" became, internationally, a bigger but quite different phenomenon: "Here I was making a roadkill tribute to High Noon and Hitchcock, then the Europeans were reading in all this esoteric abstract symbolism about class warfare in America". It also, so he says, earned him the instant and lasting respect of Fellini (cue archive photo to prove this!).

Hey look, this film is basically an hour of a geeky guy in a little red car being chased up and down the mountain by one helluva scary truck. You can find much more if you want to look for it - Dostoevsky stuff about man and machines, or the 20th century post-feminist crisis of male identity, or the jurisprudential question of whether we need to be able to attribute a motive to evildoing, etc - but, for me, what nails the simple greatness of this piece is that WE ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS in the end. On that level alone, it won't disappoint.