Ed in Raising Arizona wants a baby from her class superiors, but Lou Jean’s beef is with the state — they have taken her child away from her for being an unfit mother. So the drama of The Sugarland Express is one of the individuals against the state and how the state responds when order is upset by an individual. Especially when the individual inspires thousands of other individuals — in other words, “the people,” the same people the state is supposed to be serving.

The structure goes something like this:

ACT I: Lou Jean busts her husband Clovis out of jail, they hitch a ride out of town, lead a state patrol car on a wild chase, kidnap a Patrolman named Slide and head to Sugarland, where Lou Jean hopes to be reunited with her baby. All this happens in a brisk 22 minutes.

ACT II: The principal antagonist, Captain Tanner, emerges and marshals the forces of the state against Lou Jean. He leads a number of patrol cars across the state on a slow-speed chase behind Lou Jean that lasts into the night. He considers assassinating Lou Jean and Clovis but then thinks better of it. A roadblock trap backfires and creates a traffic snarl that allows Lou Jean to escape into the night. This takes us to 57:00.

ACT III: Lou Jean and Clovis have a respite where they hide out in a used car lot, where they camp in a mobile home, play house and watch a Roadrunner cartoon at a nearby drive-in. In the morning, a couple of unlicensed yahoos show up with shotguns and proceed to blow the hell out of the car lot. Captain Tanner arrives with his men and allows Lou Jean to go free again, while he arrests the yahoos. This takes us to 1:17:00.

ACT IV: Lou Jean leads what is now hundreds of police cars, media vans and onlookers across the state. They are swamped by well-wishers as they pass through a small town and eventually arrive in Sugarland, where, unbeknownst to them, a trap has been set by Captain Tanner. Clovis is shot and he, Slide and Lou Jean desperately try to make it for the border. They make it halfway through the river before Clovis dies and Lou Jean is arrested.

(The end title tells us that Lou Jean finally got her baby back after serving a 15-month prison sentence — that would make her and her son just the right age to become Melinda Dillon and Carey Guffey in Close Encounters.)

NOTES:

A few minutes into the movie, Lou Jean, while visiting Clovis in a low-security prison, pulls him into a bathroom and begins to initiate sex. Clovis is flustered and upset, especially when it turns out Lou Jean doesn’t want sex at all — it’s all part of her escape plan. This is the first time a sex scene is played for laughs in a Spielberg movie, but it would not be the last. It would take, by my estimation, another 20 years before Spielberg would present a mature, straightforward scene of two people having sex.

And as long as we’re here, let’s look at the romance between Lou Jean and Clovis.  Lou Jean busts Clovis out of jail against his will, then forces him to kidnap Patrolman Slide, and essentially keeps kicking his ass forward until he’s dead.  It’s played well, but that’s essentially the dynamic of their relationship.  That, to me, is something other than a mature view of love.  It almost seems like Lou Jean would be better off getting her baby all by herself, since she has to boss Clovis into every transgression (much like Ed in Raising Arizona, except here Lou Jean is the protagonist).  It’s telling that Clovis’s idea of a romantic evening is curling up on the bed and watching Roadrunner cartoons — he’s still just a kid himself.

Spielberg’s use of lenses and camera movement is as fluid and skilled as it is in Duel; what impresses here is his work with actors. There is a warm naturalism to all the acting, especially among the large supporting cast, which is essentially the yokels and goofballs from the “armada” scene in Jaws stretched out over an entire movie. Spielberg presents these yahoos with great affection and humanity. There is plenty of typical Spielbergian wit and punch as scenes move with an effortless grace created through sheer visual kinetics — Character A moves from point 1 to point 2, carrying prop B which is important to plot point 3, etc. etc. The character scenes all land nicely with only occasional broadness, but Spielberg really lets loose with the car chases and shootouts. You can tell that’s where his real interest lies — or rather, you can tell that action is what he’s more comfortable shooting (this dichotomy of action-over-character is most pronounced in 1989’s Always).

Captain Tanner is an interesting antagonist, as he is essentially sympathetic with the protagonist. As a man, he wants Lou Jean to be reunited with her child, as a peace officer (or tool of the state, if you prefer) he is required to act with lethal force to maintain order. The fact that no one’s life is ever really in danger and the only real property damage caused by Lou Jean is a wreck Buick does not concern the state — she has rebelled against the state and the state must quash her rebellion. One could say that Tanner is caught between the natural law of human families and the man’s law of the state.

Lou Jean and Clovis hit the road with their kidnapped patrolman in an attempt to mend their family, and so become a kind of ad hoc family on the way. Max Slide becomes their punished child, their palling brother and their scolding father at different times in the movie, and even briefly becomes a potential point in a romantic triangle.

There’s a wonderful scene as Lou Jean and Clovis watch the Roadrunner cartoon at the drive-in. They can’t hear the sound, so Clovis begins to supply the sound effects. As he watches the cartoon, he, and we, begin to realize that Lou Jean and Clovis, like the Coyote, are caught in an endless pursuit across the desert, a pursuit that will not, and cannot, end well for the Coyote.

The structure is basically this:

ACT I: Mann sets out for his trip. He has a couple of encounters with the truck and begins to suspect that the truck, for whatever reason, has it in for him. After an apparent attempt on his life, he stops to rest at Chuck’s Diner, where he worries that the driver of the rig is watching him, judging him. He lashes out at a man he’s convinced is the driver, but is proven wrong and made to look like a fool. He continues on his journey.

ACT II: The truck harasses Mann some more, and its attempts to kill him become pronounced and distinct. This is no coincidence, the truck is honestly trying to kill him. After a number of these attempts, Mann fools the truck into bypassing him and takes another rest.

ACT III: Mann’s attempt to elude the truck fail, and the third act is pretty much one long chase scene as Mann desperately tries to turn the tables on the truck.

SOME SUBTEXT: While sweating it out in Chuck’s diner, Mann whines to himself about how one simple thing can tear away the veneer of civilization and put a man “right back in the jungle,” but the laws of Duel seem to have a more medieval origin. “Honor” plays a significant role: the protagonist is a man stuck in an early-seventies world where honor, specifically masculine honor, is under constant attack. His wife criticizes him for not defending her honor at a party, he whinges at the prospect of his mother coming to visit (a prospect that reduces him to a child), he gripes to a gas-station attendant that he’s not the boss of his house, a caller on a radio show he listens to complains about how not having a job has removed his title of “head of family.” (Family is a burden in Duel, a rarity in Spielberg’s work, although not surprising in a movie made by a 21-year-old. 21!) When Mann(the extra “n” is for extra iNadequacy!)’s life is in danger, “real men” in cowboy boots glare pitilessly at him, old men laugh at him, he is made to sit my himself in the “pink section” of the diner, where he can barely muster the manliness to order the ultra-un-macho meal of a cheese sandwich and a glass of water. It doesn’t help his case that Mann, as played by Dennis Weaver, with his tidy mustache, at times resembles a weak-jawed Burt Reynolds.

Balancing “honor” in a civilized world, of course, is “duty.” Mann has a duty to his family, to his job, to the middle-class suburban society he represents. He’s a Civilized Man, and his sense of duty is so great that, even after he suspects that his life is in danger, he still proceeds to his job appointment — even after the truck has tried to shove his car into the path of an oncoming train and he’s hours late for his appointment, Mann does not turn around and head home — he grimly pushes ahead. Perhaps he feels his duty to his family is that great, or perhaps he decides he would rather be fighting for his life with a homicidal maniacthan back home with his shrewish wife and burdensome kids.

(To beat the truck, he runs at it head on, shoves his briefcase marked “David Mann” [his briefcase is his life] against the gas pedal and dives out of the car, abandoning his life, and his suburban morality, seemingly once and for all.)

In Act II, Mann is required to stop to help a stalled school bus get started again — his attachment to suburban responsibilities extend even into his life-or-death struggle in the desert. As he valiantly attempts to assist the bus (the car he drives is even called a Valiant, I am not making this up), the suburban kids make faces and jeer at him for his lameness. (I’m surprised his Valiant is red — the character is about as beige as they come.) The movie not called Truck Fight or Meaningless Attack, it’s called Duel, and one recalls that a duel begins when one’s honor has been offended.

The truck, of course, knows no honor at all. Its filth and smoke stand as a symbol of pollution, its size and aggression stand as symbols of everything that pushes Mann around and makes him feel small and helpless. To string all the symbols along, one could say that the tanker truck symbolizes the heartless, homicidal oil economy (cf There Will Be Blood) that created the middle class that Mann belongs to, and also created the automobile culture that allowed for the suburbs in which he lives so safely.

(Spielberg insists, by the way, that he was thinking of none of this while shooting Duel, and I believe him, but that doesn’t mean that the meaning is not there.  My guess is that the highly skilled direction belongs to the young director and the cultural symbolism comes from the writer Richard Matheson.)

(Or maybe the truck is meant to symbolize a more pure evil. After all, it has “FLAMMABLE” written in huge letters on its sides [although it pointedly does not explode when it falls off a cliff] and it is involved in a set piece staged at a gas station called “Snakarama.”)

SOME CONTEXT: Mann and his bespectacled, civilized-man-in-the-moral-jungle predicament recall the protagonist of Straw Dogs (Mann’s wife even complains of being “almost raped” by another man), the physical predicament allude to Wages of Fear (and predict Sorcerer, its remake), the motiveless-evil of the truck recalls The Birds and anticipates Halloween and Death Proof. I don’t know if Hitchcock saw Duel, but its out-of-control downhill car chase is echoed in Family Plot.