Provided it has the right director, of course. As an exercise – and it is scarcely (if elegantly) more than that – Duel is proof positive that a truck menacing a car on the California highway is all the story necessary for a film to exist. If you want to “play the audience like a violin”, as Alfred Hitchcock once phrased it to François Truffaut, you can’t be slashing away at the strings all the time. Now 50 years and countless awards, accolades and box-office dollars later, Duel feels like the proto-Jaws, an early statement of principles on how to build suspense and terror through patience, simplified action and delayed gratification. 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. 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. 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. Duel was not Spielberg’s first time behind the camera by any means.
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