His name came to public notice in a modest way with his first feature DUEL (1971) which was made for American television and broadcast in November 1971. It was not his first professional work, however. He had tried to enter the film school at the University of Southern California on the basis of amateur movies he had made, including his two-hour-long science fiction film Firelight. He failed. They had accepted George Lucas, John Milius, and were about to accept John Carpenter, but they would not take young Spielberg. But eventually, at the age of 21, after haunting the lot at Universal Studios and making a 35mm documentary about hitchhiking called Amblin’ he was given a job as one of three directors making a television pilot for a new series called Night Gallery.

In 1971 he had seven separate episodes for various television series broadcast, but DUEL – which was an actual full-length movie and not just an episode of something – was what caught people’s eyes. There was no immediate excitement – although DUEL was well received by both critics and audiences alike, it was not until 1973 that it gained release as a cinema film in Europe and Australia with added footage, increasing its duration from 74 minutes to 90 minutes. That was when it started winning festival prizes and rave reviews, and suddenly Spielberg’s career really took off.

DUEL is a text-book example of the Monster Movie – one of the best ever made – with a very unusual monster, a large rather decrepit-looking semi-trailer truck. The script was by the Richard Matheson, based on his own short story originally published in Playboy magazine.

Matheson was responsible for scripting a record number of unforgettable genre hits which include The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), The House Of Usher (1960), The Pit And The Pendulum (1961), Burn Witch Burn (1962), Tales Of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), Comedy Of Terrors (1963), The Devil Rides Out (1968), The Legend Of Hell House (1973), What Dreams May Come (1998), as well as made-for-television movies like Trilogy Of Terror (1975) and The Night Stalker (1972). Matheson also scripted sixteen immortal episodes of Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone series, and I’d bet at least a quarter of The Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror stories are also inspired by Matheson’s writings!

Dennis Weaver plays the man in DUEL whose car is repeatedly attacked for no particular reason by a truck he has overtaken. It is definitely the truck that is the ‘monster’ and not its driver, who is never fully seen. It is the truck itself that seems malevolent, its headlights like the glowing eyes of some great dinosaur as it lurks in ambush, its engines like the growling of some vast beast.

The film has virtually no dialogue, it is pure cinema brilliantly edited, about an ordinary man-in-the-street (like most of Spielberg’s heroes), being driven to the brink of madness by a violent attack out of no-where. The idea of horror erupting out of normality is basic to the Monster Movie, and it has rarely been done better.

Even the ending has its own wonderful logic, when the truck finally leaps voraciously, not on Weaver but his car, and goes over a cliff in the attempt: In the one moment of overt horror, the truck utters a bellowing death-cry as it plunges to its doom.

Spielberg made two more feature-length movies for television: Something Evil (1972), about the possession of a young girl, and Savage (1973) was a run-of-the-mill private eye story. Both were competent, neither was extraordinary, and neither received cinema release. But after the overseas success of DUEL, he was given a cinema feature to direct: Sugarland Express (1974) starring Goldie Hawn and William Atherton as the jailbird couple on the run in an effort to save their baby boy from being adopted. Well-made and sentimental, it quietly sank out of sight due to poor promotion. Next on Spielberg’s ‘To Do’ list was the box-office record-breaker Jaws (1975) and the rest, as they say, is history.

Spielberg’s biggest hits remain those that tell of unearthly wonders from a child’s point of view – like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial – or at least from the point of view of the child within – like Jurassic Park (1993). When he tries to break out of this familiar formula, he is usually criticised for doing so.  For instance, his first attempt at a non-fantastic film resulted in The Colour Purple (1985) which was accused of sanitising Alice Walker’s original novel and deemed a failure by many critics.

However, when Spielberg works within his formula, he has unparalleled success, and almost single-handedly given Hollywood’s special effects industry a huge boost.

What with giant dinosaurs, alien visitors, temples of doom and the like, DUEL is the least complicated film Spielberg would ever make, however it still plays very powerfully today.