Duel was Spielberg’s first major film, which was
made for the small screen initially. It was the film that started his career
and led to him making other films, like Jaws,
E.T, Indiana Jones etc.
Spielberg only had ten days to make Duel, which was considered impossible to
do at the time. In the end it actually took about thirteen day. Everything was
real in this film, so when you see explosions, crashes, smoke etc it’s not CGI.
Duel seems
to have many influences from Hitchcock, like the opening scene where it sticks
to David Mann’s(Denis Weaver’s) point of view using extreme close ups. For
example, you see through the windscreen what David Mann is looking at, then a close up of
his reaction, and then back to his point of view.
It’s
also interesting how even though the truck, in real life, was going around
40-50 miles an hour, they filmed it using a camera mounted on a car driving in
the opposite direction, which, along with the cliff wall in the background,
created the impression it was going a 100 miles an hour.
Denis
Weaver does a good job of portraying extremes of anxiety, and is particularly
effective as an everyman character who the audience can easily identify with.
I also liked the way Spielberg planned the
story. Rather than using a storyboard, he used an overland map with arrows
pointing to all the scenes in the film.
The
use of close ups reminded me of Hitchcock’s Rear
Window and North by North West. Duel
also has some excellent suspense, which
Spielberg admits that he owes to Hitchcock’s characteristic drawing out of
tension for as long as possible, such as the scene in the bar when he gives us
little clues about who might be the truck driver which makes David Mann even
more worried.
Spielberg masterfully builds tension upon
tension until the climactic scene which in many ways foreshadows the ending of
Jaws where the protagonist gambles
everything on one last desperate throw of the die.
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