The climactic stunt at the ending of Duel was more dangerous than you might realize
Stuntman Carey Loftin put himself in danger for the film.
Stuntpeople are the unsung heroes of the film set. Often risking life and limb, stuntmen and women add excitement to a movie, often making even the most outrageous ideas a reality.
In a film like Duel (1971), many of the stunts involved automobiles. While that upped the excitement, it also increased the danger. Stunt performer Carey Loftin served as the often unseen antagonist terrorizing David Mann throughout the film. A trained stunt performer, Loftin was responsible for many of the film’s more complicated stunts, including one that could have gone terribly wrong.
Director Steven Spielberg recalled one scene during the climax of Duel, where a car and a truck collide, falling down a hill.
“One of the problems with this jumping-out stunt was the ‘dead man’s clutch,’” said Spielberg, according to The Steven Spielberg Story, written by Tony Crawley. “If you take your hand off the throttle, the truck will immediately stop. He had to get a momentum going before jumping out.”
Because the stunt required the truck to keep moving, Loftin jury-rigged a system to attempt to keep the truck in motion, even without a driver.
“So what he did was, he tied a rope around the throttle to the dashboard, to keep the truck going, you know, full bore into the car,” said Spielberg. “He practised the stunt many times. He’d jump a safe distance back, slam the door, and the truck would fall off the cliff, hitting the car.”
During filming, however, the setup began to fall apart, and Loftin was forced to improvise.
“What happened was, at the point of no return, when he was going at about 35mph and coming into the car, the cord broke, and the ‘dead man’s’ switch came off,” said the director. “The truck began to accelerate, and Carey had to ride the truck down to about twenty yards from the side of the cliff. Now, twenty yards isn’t doing very much when you’re doing 35 mph. And he jumped at the very last moment. The scissors in my editing room came just a frame after Carey’s butt is out of the frame - he’s at the beginning of the shot. Leaping for his life.”
