Retrospective Film Review

Duel (1971) • 50 Years Later — a remarkable calling card for a prodigious talent

A driver on a lonely road is menaced by a mysterious truck.

Sometimes, a place in film history is a curse. Citizen Kane (1941) is funny in parts, but who watches it for a laugh nowadays? Who can sit through Casablanca (1942) without anticipating all of its legendary lines? Or watch Psycho (1960) as if it were unfolding afresh, without counting down the minutes until Janet Leigh takes a shower?

A similar kind of over-awareness afflicts Duel, Steven Spielberg’s feature debut (although he’d already made an acclaimed almost-feature-length episode of TV’s Columbo), which it’s all too easy to see as the first step in an illustrious career, and ignore its merits in itself. Is that zoom to David Mann (Dennis Weaver) in his car a precursor to the famous Jaws (1975) dolly zoom up to Roy Scheider’s face? Doesn’t this gas station show up again in 1941 (1979)? Could the grubby rig chasing Mann down empty California roads be a more malign version of the beneficent alien craft in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)…