Author Joseph McBride notes in Steven Spielberg: A Biography that “Duel was a perfect match of story and director. Spielberg has always tended to place his protagonist - “Mr. Everyday Regular Fella” - in an extraordinary situation testing his abilities to survive and overcome the tedium and terror of mundane reality.”
The Story
In Duel, traveling salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) passes a truck driver who then tailgates and attacks Mann on the road for the rest of the film. Is it simple road rage taken to the extreme? We are never given the reason for the truck driver’s relentless drive to frighten and possibly murder Mann. The story is an enigma wrapped in violent suspense. With Mann in a mid-sized, red Plymouth Valiant sedan and his nameless antagonist in a large, dusty 1955 Peterbilt 281 tanker truck, it is the well-known story of David versus Goliath, Man versus Other.
This fight is especially played up in the scene where the truck gets ahead of Mann and blocks his way so that the two vehicles are facing each other. In the California desert, heat waves apparent, a twiddle of guitar, Mann stares down his faceless nemesis then floors the gas pedal in an attempt to get past the truck. It's a corny old west motif (especially when a tumbleweed blows across the screen out of nowhere), but it deftly breaks the suspense, giving the audience a breather with a little levity while maintaining the story.
The Backstory
With a minimum of dialogue, perhaps even too many lines (Over an hour of constant "Oh! He's trying to kill me!" is unintentionally funny.), this is nearly a silent film. The engines of the vehicles that we see on the long, open road converse more with each other than do humans with each other. Speechless drivers and noisy cars - it’s almost as if the vehicles are meant to be more human than the actors. Indeed, producer George Eckstein remembers the casting session for the truck, saying that Spielberg chose “the smallest one, but the only one that had a great snout. I thought that with some remodeling we could really get it to look human. I had the art director add two tanks on both sides of the doors…. They were like the ears of the truck.”