Spielberg's Duel (1971) and The Incredible Hulk (1978)

I first caught Steven Spielberg's made-for-TV film debut Duel on television in early grade school. At that time I had only recently become aware of this thing called a "film director", and could name exactly three: Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. So I was curious to see this earliest work from the guy who gave me nightmares with Jaws and left me watching the skies after Close Encounter of the Third Kind.

Based on the short story by Richard Matheson, Duel is a tense thriller built around a simple premise: a milquetoast salesman (Dennis Weaver as David Mann, in a mostly one-man-show) on a cross-country road trip, finds himself the seemingly random target of a psychopathic truck driver.

Their first encounters are of the nuisance variety.... the slow, over-sized vehicle hogs the road, only to tailgait once passed, etc., but slowly escalate into deliberate harassment, reckless endangerment, and finally a full on murderous chase with Weaver driving for his life.

You can detect elements in Duel that would appear in Spielberg's later work... the  monstrous, expressionless truck is reminiscent of the relentless, pursuing great white from Jaws. 

We're gonna need a bigger car.

Comical, colorful elderly supporting characters flavor some scenes, as they later would in Sugarland Express and Close Encounters.

A run-in with a road-side exhibit of snakes and spiders seems like a first draft of the creepy crawly encounters of Indiana Jones.

Simple but effective camera work distinguishes Duel from lesser made-for-TV fare of the period. The opening titles, artfully arranged around the geometry of the tunnels as the camera passes through.

Interesting shots like this, with Weaver framed in a laundromat dryer window...

...or this perspective shot which places Weaver's tiny car in the consuming cloud of the truck's smokestack. 

But what really made Duel stand out was the out-of-nowhere, big twist ending that nobody saw coming. Weaver's car has overheated at the top of a hill and is cornered against a high cliff ledge when suddenly his eye's start to glaze over...

...his shirt rips open...

...and he transforms into a mean, green smashing machine. What the---? David Mann is actually The Incredible Hulk??

Hulk smash telephone pole!

Hulk hit truck with pole!

Hulk push car into truck!

Truck driver jump to safety!

Truck and car spill over cliff!

Hulk celebrate!

What's that you say? This isn't the ending you remember? 

Okay... so, this happened: Universal, the studio that produced both Duel and the 1970s television series The Incredible Hulk, got the bright idea of building a first-season episode entirely around repurposed footage from Spielberg's mini-masterpiece.

The plot finds David Banner (Bill Bixby) picked up hitchhiking by a lady truck driver (Jennifer Darling... a former fembot from The Bionic Woman) who steals back her father's scary, flammable and strangely familiar truck from a group of smugglers.

The whole episode is a series of back-and-forth carjackings and chases in which everyone gets their turn to drive both Weaver's red 1971 Plymouth Valiant and the 1955 Peterbilt truck.

There's also new footage using the original truck, and it's cool seeing the iconic monster continue its path of destruction in an entirely new context and setting...

...not so cool? Discovering its being driven by the darling Ms. Darling.

Spielberg wisely resisted studio pressure to shoot Duel's car interiors on a stage with rear-projected backgrounds and instead filmed on location in a moving car, but we can get a sense of how things may have turned out in this Hulk episode, which went with the rear-projection technique.

Bixby and the lead smuggler (Frank Christi) each wear blue collar shirts to help match the original Weaver footage...

I can't tell where Duel ends and The Incredible Hulk begins!

...and, as The Incredible Hulk plot demands that occasionally the red car carry two occupants, the script helpfully provides excuses for the passenger to duck his head down to explain away why there is only a lone-driver visible in the inserted Duel footage.

"Duck your head all the way down under the seat and look for that gun, dammit!"

This isn't the only time a Universal television character found themselves crossing paths with a Spielberg villain. Did somebody say... Nancy Drew vs. Jaws? 

Duel is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
The Incredible Hulk episode "Never Give a Trucker an Even Break" is available on DVD and is streaming on Netflix as of this writing.
The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries episode "The Mystery of the Hollywood Phantom", featuring Jaws, is available on DVD.
Die-cast toys of Weaver's red '71 Plymouth Valiant and the 1955 Peterbilt 281 Tanker are available... NOWHERE. Come on, Hot Wheels, make this happen!

Final Jeopardy (1985)

A long lost made-for-TV movie that I've been searching out for years has finally (and unofficially) made its way onto the Internets. It's Final Jeopardy (1985), which, after years of futile Googling, I was finally able to watch (via YouTube), for the first time since it originally aired over 25 years ago.

Final Jeopardy is the suspenseful story of small-town couple Martin (Richard Thomas, You'll Like My Mother, It) and Susan Campbell (Mary Crosby, The Ice Pirates) whose overnight trip to the big city turns into a Kafkaesque (I've always wanted to use that term!) nightmare.

The Campbells are in Detroit for one evening so Martin can pitch his start-up business idea (something to do with databases) to a prospective partner. Martin drops his wife off to do some shopping in the city's upscale boutiques, while he meets his client at a nearby watering hole, the Carlyle Bar. She'll meet him there later for a (hopefully celebratory) dinner before heading back to the hotel.

Martin gets slightly overwhelmed trying to navigate the bustling streets, and a culture shock is evident when he gets directions from a gruff and annoyed street cop, but he finally arrives (late) for his meeting at the Carlyle Bar.

A few martinis later, with no sign of his client, he phones his office to find he misheard the meeting place. They were supposed to meet at the Carlwyn Bar, not the Carlyle, and his client has already given up on him and gone home for the evening. The whole purpose of the trip is shot.

Making matters worse, the bar no longer serves dinner, and is closing at 7:00 PM, a good hour before his wife was scheduled to meet him there. Exiting the bar, he finds the lot where he parked has closed for the night, leaving him with no transportation until morning.

Susan rolls up in a cab, but the cab leaves before he has a chance to stop it, leaving the couple stranded in what is looking to be the Bad Side of Town.

The businesses are closed, streets are dark and barren. Many of the pay phones are damaged. When they finally do find a working phone, the cab company they call won't send a car to that part of town after dark.

The police won't send anyone either, since no crime has been committed.

They try approaching residents of a rat-infested apartment building, but they are too afraid to provide help.

Finally they cross paths with a violent street gang (they may have comical names like Slash, D.O.A. and Ice, but they were plenty scary to this pre-teen viewer). This results in several tense scenes with our hapless couple creeping behind dumpsters and in back alleys trying to evade the thugs, only to have them pop-up like a Jack-in-the-Box from around the corner, or suddenly dangling down from an overhead fire escape.

It looks like they may finally have found a safe haven for the night when they happen upon an abandoned theater, but while rummaging through the mess of old props and scenery, they uncover.... A CORPSE!

In another encounter, they find a hobo (Jeff Corey, he also played a bum 20 years earlier in Lady in a Cage) who sells them a flashlight and directions to get to the nearest police station... get this... through the underground sewers, so as to avoid detection by the murderous gang.

The Campbells take him up on his offer, and attempt the spooky passage through the dark tunnels, only to emerge back in front of the Carlyle Bar once again!

Final Jeopardy reminded me somewhat of Duel (1971), in that we have a modern, emasculated man (after first encountering the gang, Martin admits to his wife he's never hit a man before, having always talked his way out of tough predicaments) who suddenly finds himself in a survival situation, and must learn to accept that some conflicts can only be resolved through brute force, not rational arbitration.

Also, as in Duel, there comes a point where our protagonist is so consumed with panic over the situation that he ends up frightening people that might otherwise have been convinced to help him, if he weren't acting like a raving madman.

But that's where all similarities to Duel end, as Final Jeopardy is really just a mediocre thriller, not approaching the greatness of that earlier masterpiece.

Final Jeopardy has not been released to DVD as of this writing.