Steven Spielberg Kicked Off His Career In Thrilling Style With Duel

Before The Post, before Schindler's List, before even Jaws and The Sugarland Express, Steven Spielberg directed Duel, a TV movie of the week that got expanded into an 89-minute-long feature-length cut for theatrical exhibition domestically and abroad (that longer cut is the one reviewed here). Spielberg's earliest directorial credits were all television work (including a segment in a horror anthology TV movie that starred Joan Crawford!) but this was the first time he got to be behind the camera on a project that reached the runtime of a typical feature-length motion picture, setting the stage for his career in directing theatrical films that was yet to come.

Hot Off The Presses Is Steven Spielberg's Entertaining New Drama The Post

Steven Spielberg's been directing movies since the early 1970's and Meryl Streep got put on the map as an actor of note forty years ago with The Deer Hunter. In the multiple decades they've both worked as prominent figures in the American film industry, it's utterly shocking their paths haven't crossed before now (though Streep did have a voice-over cameo in Spielberg's 2001 masterpiece A.I.: Artificial Intelligence). Such an odd lack of artistic collaboration is finally rectified for The Post, Steven Spielberg's new drama that pairs Streep up with Spielberg regular Tom Hanks for a timely tale of heroic journalism standing up to corrupt forces in the American government.