“I'd like to report a truck driver who's been endangering my life!” Our Steven Spielberg Series continues with a detour back to where it all started - 1971’s TV movie-turned-theatrical debut DUEL.

Mild mannered travelling salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) finds himself the unexplained target of escalating threats from a mysterious, smoke-belching truck’s largely unseen driver, as they cross the barren California desert highways locked in a cat-and-mouse chase towards an inevitably deadly conclusion.

Under contract as the wunderkind development project of then-Universal president Sid Sheinberg, the 24-year-old Spielberg lobbied to follow up his seminal Columbo episode with this Richard Matheson-penned thriller as a forum to flex his aptitude for visceral action and tension. After pulling in a very respectable audience share and earning a run in European cinemas, Spielberg was ready to take his explorations of overmatched man versus an unstoppable force onto the water…

Join Gali, Devlin and Matt at the Snakearama for a sinister cheese on rye sandwich of suspense!

Rewind Movie Podcast merchandise, and shirt designs from some of our favourite films, are available here.

If you have a film you’d like the gang to tackle, send us an email at rewindmoviepodcast@gmail.com. For introductions, essays, playlists, and the full back catalogue of episodes and specials, find us at rewindmoviecast.com.

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Bangarang! We continue our journey through the filmography of The Beard Himself, Steven Spielberg, with a contrasting look at fatherhood in 1991’s grand kids’ fantasy Hook.

A now adult Peter Pan (Robin Williams) has no memories of his time in Neverland, having committed himself to a life of dour responsibility as a successful lawyer under the name Peter Banning. Returning for the first time to the home of Wendy, grandmother to his wife, he receives a sharp reminder of his previous adventures when Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) kidnaps his two young children - necessitating a crash course in whimsy, imagination, flying, and sword fighting from the Lost Boys, now led by the brooding Rufio.

While Spielberg tackling the story of the boy who never grew up seemed like a slam dunk, the project took almost a decade to make it to the screen, and bloated in running time, shoot days, budget, and tabloid intrigue along the way. A sizeable box office haul couldn’t dispel a reputation as a critical failure and a financial disappointment, relative to expectations. But, did the Rewind Lost Boys dig into a steaming imagination buffet of nostalgic fun, or were we left lamenting our lost marbles.

A Merry Christmas from the gang - if you’d like to help us out this year, we would be thrilled if you would consider donating a few pounds to MediCinema, a wonderful organisation who provide cinema screenings to hospital patients across the country. Those few hours of immersive relief can be so important for people going through such difficult times.

https://www.medicinema.org.uk/donate/

Rewind Movie Podcast merchandise, and shirt designs from some of our favourite films, are available here.

If you have a film you’d like the gang to tackle, send us an email at rewindmoviepodcast@gmail.com. For introductions, essays, playlists, and the full back catalogue of episodes and specials, find us at rewindmoviecast.com.

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The Rewind Movie Podcast pays our respects to the Beard, as we embark on a rewatch series of some of the highlights and lesser-travelled avenues of the career of arguably the most successful director in the history of the medium - Steven Spielberg.

Our starting point (having already lavished our praise on Jaws) is his self-penned, emotionally-charged, 1977 alien visitation blockbuster drama Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The freshly-minted star director utilised all of his newfound influence to bring a bombastic, visually resplendent, and grandly-scored vision of the after effects of a blue-collar suburban dad seeing a series of UFOs in the skies over Indiana.

Not yet 30, Spielberg mined his formative years for the film, loosely adapting an amateur 16mm feature he made as a 17-year-old, and investing this tale of a dissolving marriage with the messy verisimilitude of a young man still processing his own parents’ estrangement.

Rewind Movie Podcast merchandise, and shirt designs from some of our favourite films, are available here.

If you have a film you’d like the gang to tackle, send us an email at rewindmoviepodcast@gmail.com. For introductions, essays, playlists, and the full back catalogue of episodes and specials, find us at rewindmoviecast.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.