It’s important for serious movie critics, amateur and professional alike, to come to terms with Steven Spielberg, because of his success in financial terms, influence, and esteem in certain quarters. He has been discussed voluminously by many more qualified to do so than I, and in any event there’s no space here for me to cover a lot of his oeuvre.
One reason I do this entry now, in addition to the merits of the movie in question, is that I am one admirer of his who has to express disappointment in some of his recent cinematic works. War Horse and, of less interest (to me), The Adventures of Tintin—neither of which I’ve seen (the reviews told me enough)—show his catering to family audiences—i.e., to a sort of almost willfully naïve mentality. This sort of directorial aim is especially noticeable (in the longer view of his career) in the watershed (and likable) E.T. (1982), the Indiana Jones stuff (1981 and after), and the forgotten likes of Hook (about 1991), among other works. This quality, along with whatever other beefs, leaves some movie lovers regarding him as something of a hopeless lightweight, a sort of Paul McCartney among major movie directors.
Spielberg’s illustrious career leads to a recent swerve to sentimentality
I quickly point out that he is the only director who can attract the breadth of audiences he does who also has creditably treated the Holocaust (Schindler’s List, 1993), the American slave trade (the less effective Amistad, 1997), and World War II (Saving Private Ryan, 1998) and made other intelligently adult films like the dense, dystopian Minority Report (2002), the relatively earthy Catch Me If You Can (2002), and the underappreciated A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). Sure, his cinematic technique can be glib, but he can also be elegant, and generally he does a good job to, when he wants, shape difficult subjects for middle-class audiences willing to grapple, on occasion, with more serious fare.
A.I. was really Stanley Kubrick’s final film, because its general treatment (plot outline and many conceptual and design features) was developed by Kubrick; only the final details-setting script was written by Spielberg. Hence it is another occasion to note that, in 2001, a couple years after Kubrick’s death, when Spielberg (figuratively speaking) joined forces with the formidably existentialist and some-would-say-bleak Kubrick, he showed what an adult (if mixed-tones) film he could make.
But what a difference 10 years and all the past decade’s shocks to the U.S. financial, social, and cultural system make, along with other reasons to assess the marketplace. When in 2010, Spielberg executive-produced the remake of True Grit, a film by Kubrick’s arguable heirs as a Jewish, sophisticated, dry-eyed, and prolific directorial force, the Coen brothers, I found this film (based on a generally funny story) to be interesting and admirable in some ways but still lacking, in part due to the Spielberg influence: this latter includes a sort of sentimental repetition of close-ups of a cutie-face (teen star Hallee Steinfeld), as if the producer/marketing thinking was that a cool, droll western is best digested by the masses with a doll-like face repeatedly posed amid the tumbleweeds like a religious icon or comfort food. Another pandering feature was the unobtrusive but still noticeable computer processing of the photography (such as in the early, prologue glimpse of Chaney riding away, and later panoramic scenes—the first broad use of photo conditioning used by the Coens since O Brother, Where Art Thou? [2000]).
In short, this movie had something of a general smoothing over, though the Coens’ characteristic crisp editing and mischievous humor, and cinematographer Roger Deakins’ trademark clinically high-fidelity photography, remain. Another compromise is versatile composer/musical director Carter Burwell’s score; his taste for the Coens’ work is usually so good that it surprises me that the True Grit score is his most bland and forgettable for the Coens that I am aware of.
The movie as an overall result is a sort of meal that was like the kind of puts-hair-on-your-chest satiric “roughage” that you expect from the Coens adulterated by a sweet, heavy cream (the Spielberg touch) put on top. I much more liked the Coens’ previous film, the smaller-scope, funny, and vivid A Serious Man (2009), which, as a good ethnically centered story does, clearly shows the universal relevance beyond the parochial.
In short, however you want to criticize these cultural times, it seems Spielberg hasn’t done a good adult film since at least the flawed but interesting Munich (2005), and I can lightly nod my head if people were to respond to War Horse with another, “There again goes Spielberg, squandering his talents on being a family-friendly Peter Pan.” His Lincoln (forthcoming), which I understand will star the excellent actor Daniel Day Lewis, could turn out to be a glib catechism, unless Day Lewis tears it up, but in nice-guy Lincoln
Yet Spielberg had his young-greaseball days
One might ask, Did Spielberg ever do a low-budget, gritty, somewhat pessimistic film, like an dirtbag budding auteur, as did such directors as Coppola, Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and others who did dues-paying apprentice work with the cinematic chop-shop owner Roger Corman? Did Spielberg ever do basic ’70s paranoiac, genre stuff, made on a wing and a prayer, that nevertheless stays in a viewer’s memory? Yes, he did—and it’s an interesting film.
Duel was first made as a TV film (produced by Universal, and of course not associated with Corman--making Spielberg unusual among his generation of movie directors) and was shown on, I think, “ABC Friday Night at the Movies” or some such thing, in 1971. Later it was added to for theatrical release in Europe (1972). It might seem to the uninitiated, who are yet familiar with some stills from it, like The Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour—worth one watch, and then (unless you’re a true fan) you don’t care to see it again.
But I think Duel holds up over multiple viewings pretty well. Sure, it’s TV movie fare, but made when TV movies were built like some old GM cars—pretty sturdy, well-crafted, and serviceable as a product aimed at a solidly demotic market. This one is better than some of those Friday night horror movies made for TV that creeped us kids out at the end of a school week, but which today we can barely remember.
You might recall that Universal, a studio started in about the 1920s that carved out its niche as the home to monster movies like the ~1931 Frankenstein, by the 1950s was solidly regarded as a second- or third-rate studio (a sort of a “Chrysler” to the “Ford” and “GM” of Paramount and, arguably, Warner Brothers), yet it was still a place an actor could get respectable enough work. It was bought in about 1959 (here I’m probably muffing the story a bit) by agent Lew Wasserman and his company MCA, and then MCA tried to steer it toward its better fortunes through a mix of strategies like being the new home for Wasserman's client Alfred Hitchcock (until his death, it turned out) and yet, in selected ways, aimed to young audiences. At the same time, television movies could be a focus for a movie studio and not be mere dabbling in complete dreck.
By about 1971, you had a situation where an old esteemed director like Hitchcock, past his glory years yet still depended on by Universal to bring some profit and prestige to the company, could produce the interesting but not-tops political thriller Topaz (1969) on a big budget, which today seems in a way like a glorified TV movie; and the cold bit of Psycho-redux of Frenzy (1972). Meanwhile, other directors started in TV—Spielberg, in his early twenties, did one or more episodes of the show Columbo—and got their break doing something like Duel, which apparently impressed the Universal suits enough that Spielberg was allowed to film extra scenes to flesh the movie out into feature length, with which it got distributed in Europe. Duel, today, is regarded as the first notable film of the, of course, now legendary and influential Spielberg.
One could remark, or not, on what kind of baton was being passed, in a sense, when Universal served as a sort of crossroads for the “lion in winter” of Hitchcock and the young, promising Spielberg.
A simple story is given flesh by directorial technique
Based on a short story, and not containing much plot, the film concerns a sort of Everyman, David Mann, played by Dennis Weaver, a TV actor remembered mainly for the weekly Western McCloud but having played in two memorable films by notable directors—this one and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. He seems to combine a sturdy, unthreatening Western quality with the capacity to portray emotional distress without seeming effeminate. In Duel, Weaver is solid and relatable as Mann who is someone just trying to mind his business in an ugly red Plymouth Basic Crate (a Valiant [not a Reliant, as I first said]), driving soberly in desert locations to a distant business meeting. Then Mann’s routinely passing a grimy tanker truck, twice, apparently spurs the truck driver to start stalking, tailgating, and otherwise terrorizing him for the bulk of the rest of the movie. (Given the philosophic tenor of the times, “Mann” may have reminded some watchers of the existential idea of Man being “thrown” into his circumstances, and—I think Nietzsche said—needing to be like the camel in the desert who takes his burden and….)
The movie isn’t all road scenes with dust, exhaust, and sagebrush; one finely wrought sequence (by the movie’s own standards) is an extended scene in its middle, at a roadside diner/bar with several hicks as customers, regarding whom Mann fearfully wonders if one is the dreaded truck driver, whose truck he has suddenly noticed parked outside. The emotional turmoil of his character is handled in ’70s TV fashion, with voiceover representation of thinking to himself. But the absurdity of plotting out in nervous mental rehearsal how you want to apologetically, yet with bravado, approach someone who is trying to murder you as if you owe the person something is still gripping, even if it is part and parcel of a genre form of art.
(By the way, though this movie may leave some with a new fear of the big truck they see looming in their rearview the next time they’re on the interstate, I should point out that as a group, truck drivers are safer and more capable than passenger-vehicle drivers. They are responsible cowboys who know how to drive a stick-shift and are aware of what to try to do if air breaks fail. The movie is mere whimsy, but a break from reality like glomming down a big bag of popcorn even if you know it isn’t healthy to do regularly.)
This storyline may seem insubstantial, but in its technique, this movie shows what a good director can do to keep an audience’s attention through feature film length: emotional connection—one of Spielberg’s trademarks, an everyday man with glimpses of his homely family early on; and suspense managed with careful editing, along with Spielberg’s more notable way of creating a mythology about something that otherwise might seem a bit mundane: here, a truck and its unseen but obviously menacing driver.
The truck (I have read) has a 1955 Peterbilt tractor; and obviously the tractor hauls a somewhat short fuel tanker; and overall, it looks like it was parked in a filthy deep-frier, and it appallingly spews out pre-pollution-controls exhaust like a Third World smelting plant gone haywire. Camera angles, even looking up at the truck’s undercarriage (a fact I appreciate as a fan of trucks when I was a kid), help make this machine impress as a sort of monster, a dinosaur without CGI (computer-generated imagery) tarting it up.
Duel suggests a prodigious career to come
Editing, camera placement, pacing, and even sound (though the sound editing tends to be rather sloppy in this movie), plus a soundtrack with figures alluding to Psycho and including other early-1970s but not too trite horror-type techniques—all help propel the story. In fact, not only does this movie show how much Spielberg could do with little on dusty roads, but his way of developing a mythology out of accident and grime show in his DVD commentary to Jaws, when he alludes to the useful example that Duel set. Here, he says that film producers originally envisioned Jaws as a sort of second Duel, a chase horror film, but with a shark as the “leviathan” instead of the truck.
The sheer occasional accidental nature of making a movie is shown in a couple ways here. When scenes were added for the 1972 release, one was what gave a vivid still or short-slip useful for promotion: the truck trying to push Mann’s car into the way of a train passing at a railroad crossing. For many years, I remembered this scene since first seeing a glimpse of it (from a commercial, in the 1970s, I think)—it was one thing that intrigued me to want to watch this creeper of a movie; but I was never able to see Duel until 2010, believe it or not (and that on a 1980s video). But I wasn’t too old to enjoy it.
Among other later additions was a somewhat lengthy scene featuring the world’s most blockheaded school-bus driver, who buttonholes Mann into giving his stalled (admittedly small) school bus a push (with the Plymouth Basic Crate!) to start it. The scene seems as if it was written on the spot. The truck, which had passed through a while before (unseen by the bus driver), returns like a good monster (with headlights flicked on in a dark tunnel as it comes into sight)—and, what do you know, as Mann hurries fearfully away in a cloud of dust, the truck does a U-y and gives the needed push to the bus, causing Mann, parked ahead, to pause quizzically. Which shows how Spielberg felt that a story was given a little more social redemption, and/or more characterization to the monster, if we saw the monster could be altruistic sometimes.
Which somewhat foreshadows Schindler’s List, showing the mixed motives (or cannily disguised goodwill of a Schindler) that could go on behind enemy lines.
But as an above-average thriller to kill a Friday or Saturday night, Duel may both fill the bill and surprise you with how it does it with little money and no CGI (though enough fuel and motor oil, given rare locations for fill-ups).
[Page edited 2/7/12; 2/17/12.]
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