In Duel, a depressed middle-class husband in his forties leaves home on a business trip and enters into an escalating battle on country roads with a malevolent, unseen trucker in a beat-up old rig. Scripted by Richard Matheson, a pulp-horror specialist, it caught perfectly the paranoia of Middle Americans in the Vietnam era. Roadkill doesn't appear to have any particular context, and because the plot turns on the use of CB radio and no one has cell-phones (which figure in virtually every movie nowadays) the action seems to be taking place a decade ago.
The film's instantly likeable hero, Lewis (Paul Walker), a scholarship student at Berkeley, buys a battered 1971 car so he can pick up Venna (Leelee Sobieski), the girl of his dreams, from the University of Colorado and drive her to the East Coast for the summer vacation. But on the way he has to pick up his reckless, feckless brother Fuller (Steve Zahn) who's in a Salt Lake City jail on a drunk-and-disorderly charge.
The cocksure, irresponsible Fuller (a marvellous performance from Zahn) buys a cheap CB radio and involves Lewis in an unpleasant practical joke at the expense of a truck driver with the CB handle 'Rusty Nail'. The violent consequences of this prank they hear from the adjoining room of a beat-up motel, though all we actually see in this electrifying sequence is an anodyne reproduction, a nocturne of a sailing ship heading out from a rocky coastline through rough seas, that hangs on the wall. The painting proves all too prophetic.
The guilt-ridden Lewis insists on coming clean with the local cops, only to be told by an exasperated sheriff: 'This is an order like from an old-fashioned western - I want you out of Wyoming before the sun goes down.' From then on, they themselves become the objects of the unseen Rusty Nail's revenge. After several hair-raising encounters, they resolve not to tell Venna of their adventures when they pick her up at the clean, well-lit Colorado campus.
Ignorant of what lies ahead and excited by the world of seedy motels and truckers' bars, she says: 'Isn't it amazing nobody knows where we are. We're all alone out here.' Well, not exactly, because Rusty Nail, like some inexorable nemesis, is after them, alternately murderous and playful. One wonders whether one of his deadliest games - pursuing them at night through a deserted cornfield - is his or the producer's homage to North by Northwest. Apparently this sequence was shot in Bakersfield near the very spot where Hitchcock staged Cary Grant fleeing from the crop-dusting plane back in 1959. You can't get more reverential or referential than that. Anyway, this gripping movie is another minor peak in Dahl's uneven career.
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