Duel (1971)
Essentially one long face-off between a salesman driving through the desert and the giant tanker truck that decides to chase him down for no apparent reason, 1971’s Duel was director Steven Spielberg’s first feature film. A tense, relentless little tale, it does a stunning job of making a vehicle (we never fully see the truck’s driver, only an arm here and there) as frightening a villain as any flesh-and-bone killer. Stripped down to the suspense-genre basics (chase and be chased), Duel is a film worthy of its title.
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