“Duel” becomes a darkly funny poetic nightmare of suspense, like a more leisurely “Mad Max” film made with just two vehicles. His framing and editing are so ingenious that the flow of images never lets go. There is almost no dialogue, but Spielberg staged the film as if he were Hitchcock doing a metal-machine showdown. A salesman (Dennis Weaver in a geek mustache and wire-framed aviator specs), going on a solo business trip, drives his red Plymouth Valiant down a two-lane highway through the Mojave Desert, where he’s menaced by a dilapidated tanker truck whose driver we never see.

He essentially launched his career by directing this legendary ABC Movie of the Week, building it around a premise that, in other hands, could have been pure disposable made-for-TV ’70s-horror-film cheese. The first full-on expression of Steven Spielberg’s genius. So, without further ado, here’s Variety’s list of the 50 greatest action movies of all time. “Cut,” of course, is the action word that ends each take. You may well be surprised by the things we excluded, including movies with great action scenes (like “Dirty Harry” or Marvel movies) that ultimately fell slightly outside the genre, while others that might not have been marketed as action movies per se (such as Paul Greengrass’ greatest film) made the cut. We love Shaw Brothers classics, for example (“King Blood” and “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” came close), but martial arts movies have evolved so much that other titles took their place.

But Chuck Norris and Burt Reynolds have been eclipsed, since every film on this list had to stand the test of time. Arnold, Sly and Bruce (both Lee and Willis) each left their mark. Reading through Variety’s list, you’ll learn a thing or two about how the form has evolved over the years. Now, when it comes to the all-time greatest action movies, the bar is set considerably higher. Action is the very thing that sets motion pictures apart from still photography, and while it took Hollywood a few decades to figure out what an “action movie” actually was, the genre traces its roots to the origins of the medium (go ahead, Google Thomas Edison’s early “Boxing Cats” film, or picture the outlaw firing his pistol directly into the camera at the end of Edwin S. “Action!” It’s the go-word that filmmakers say at the start of every take, as the cast springs to life on camera.

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