Suspense and horror

That sort of describes our feelings by the end of the Chiefs playoff game.  I’m not even sure anybody over sixty years old should have been watching it, at least those of us living in the Kansas City area who have fallen in love with our football team this year.  We were behind, we surged ahead, the game went into overtime, and thanks to the toss of a coin, we lost.  Neither Cliff nor I slept well after we went to bed that night; too much excitement, I guess.  

So you wouldn’t think we would have chosen to watch a movie that sent us on the same sort of roller-coaster the day after the game.  

Several days ago the grandson came over to visit.  Cliff and I had been watching an old episode of Gunsmoke, which led the two of us on to a discussion of Dennis Weaver and his fake limp.  He was type-cast in that show, with his hillbillly drawl and phony limp.  This conversation wasn’t something Arick would have been interested in, so he was fiddling with his cell phone with no input into our discussion.  Cliff mentioned that Weaver went on to do other things, which led to his recalling a movie he and I watched on TV during the nine months we lived at Coffey, Missouri, in 1974.  We had gotten our first color TV, and were looking for something to watch one evening when we came upon a movie that kept us on the edge of our seats all the way through, so much so that we’ve never forgotten it.  Dennis Weaver was the star.  The entire movie was about a truck trying to kill a guy.  “I’d like to see that again,” I said.  “We only saw it that one time.  It was scary!  I’d look it up, but I don’t know what the name of the movie was.”

Arick, with phone in hand, put “Dennis Weaver” and “truck” into a search and came up with the answer:  Duel.  

I looked on Netflix and Prime TV, but didn’t find it.  I didn’t try YouTube, which often has those old movies you can’t find anywhere else.  I don’t like the way YouTube keeps trying to force me to get a paid account.  Instead, I checked Amazon looking for it on DVD, and found it for under $10.  I decided it would be worth that much even if we only watched it once.  I ordered it immediately.

Yesterday evening we decided to watch it.  I told Cliff, “I’ll bet after all this time it will just be really corny and not that scary.  That’s what happens with most of the old shows and movies we watch from the 70’s.”

Oh my goodness!  It was like something Hitchcock would have done, and had our hearts pounding like crazy.  We thoroughly enjoyed it.  But there’s a bonus:  This DVD was a collector’s edition, since it was the first movie Steven Spielberg ever directed.  So it included quite a lengthy little spiel where Spielberg told how and why he ended up doing it, how he staged the scenes and why, and so forth.  That was more fascinating than the movie itself.  There was also an interview with the guy who wrote the original short story for Playboy magazine:  he tells how he came up with the story line (on the day of Kennedy’s death) which is almost as interesting as Spielberg’s explaination of how he directed the movie for ABC’s “movie of the week”.  

And that’s about the best $10 I’ve spent lately.   You will find the trailer for the movie HERE.

Have a great day.