Duel

Year: 1971

Grade: B+

Country: USA

Director: Spielberg

Review

surprising that this was a tv movie, one of the better i’ve seen. brian’s song is the other that comes to mind. it’s also the earliest spielberg film  i’ve seen (it’s his second feature length film) and probably the earliest worth watching. it was remade as joy ride by john dahl a few years back and i thought that was just as good as this, though it had a different arc to it. this one doesn’t have a lot of plot and is at times reminiscent of vanishing point because it’s mostly about a guy in his car. spielberg shows some promise here with basics like cross-cutting and building tension out of not much in the writing department. of course it’s easy to say that now that he’s become who he is, but it’s not difficult to see some of the promise that he realized later, here in this film.