A monstrous truck pursues a motorist in the film-maker’s seat-edge 1971 feature-length debut that hinted at greatness to come
It takes less than a minute of watching Duel, Steven Spielberg’s feature-length debut, to realize you’re in the hands of a master director. And it takes even less time than that to suspect as much, because the opening shots alone, a POV from a camera attached to the front bumper of a red Plymouth Valiant, have an unsettling visceral jolt to them, despite the mundane action of the car pulling out of a suburban driveway and heading on its way. The bumper’s-eye-view would be a major component of Walter Hill’s superb 1978 thriller The Driver. Spielberg beat it by seven years.
There are some important asterisks here. Duel was not Spielberg’s first time behind the camera by any means. He’d been unusually precocious as a child and young adult, enough to draw the attention of Universal Pictures, which commissioned the short Amblin’ from him in 1968, when he was only 22, and signed him to a seven-year directing contract on the strength of it. By the time he got to make Duel, Spielberg was already a seasoned TV director, though the fact that Duel is understood as his first feature at all is a testament to his generational talent. It started as a 77-minute programmer for ABC’s Movie of the Week and proved such a sensation that he was given additional time and money to expand it into a 90-minute feature.