Steven Spielberg’s career hit its creative stride with this television movie. Essentially a 90-minute dissertation on the slight embarrassment of being passed on the open road, Duel follows a milquetoast businessman (Dennis Weaver) on a trip who is harassed and eventually hunted by the mysterious driver of a massive tanker truck. Weaver’s ironically named David Mann undergoes continual, minor humiliations, from the kids in the back of a school bus who stick their tongues out at him to the emasculating argument he gets into with his wife during a phone call home. By the time Mann channels all this simmering anxiety into violent revenge against the truck driver, Duel has become something of a bellwether for our road-rage age.
