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Cinema: Making It

4 minute read
Jay Cocks

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ

Directed by TED KOTCHEFF

Screenplay by MORDECAI RICHLER

“You’re a little Jew boy on the make,” someone tells young Duddy Kravitz. He has already been called the kind of “cretinous little moneygrubber who causes anti-Semitism,” so there is clearly something in Buddy’s dervish anxiety to succeed that rubs people the wrong way. It can be said, too, in favor of this sharp, funny movie that Buddy’s desperate acquisitiveness is not sentimentalized or apologized for. It is only well understood.

The movie is set in Montreal from the late 1940s onward into the first pale years of the ’50s. Buddy’s father (Jack Warden) is a taxi driver. His brother is a pre-med student practically numb with the wish to be a WASP, to let the Jewishness drain out of him and get a life-supporting transfusion of blue blood. Buddy, just out of high school, works in a summer resort, tries running a roulette game on the sly, is hoodwinked into smuggling heroin for a fat-fingered hood, concocts on his own all sorts of wild-eyed quick-money schemes. The revenue from these assorted enterprises goes partly to help his brother through medical school and into the country club, and largely to buy himself a huge slice of lakeside real estate in the country. He has dreams of opening his own resort, and thinks often of what his grandfather told him: “A man without land is a nobody.”

Success eludes him, cheats him, keeps driving him. It is his only goal because he means to have it for an identity, and for a kind of bludgeon. He subsidizes his brother, but he does it with disdain, just as he acquires his property —as much an assertion as an investment. Quixotically, Buddy offers his grandfather, who tends a poor garden in his backyard, any plot he wants. But the old man refuses. He is fond of Buddy, but he is well on to him. Beautiful as it is, the land was badly got, and so for him will remain fallow.

Buddy does not understand and is briefly hurt, but there is much else that he does not understand. He loses his girl and a close friend, but remains adamantly unconfused. His apprenticeship is the kind of success that can only really be measured in loss.

Richler, adapting his own novel, portrays Buddy with the kind of wisdom that goes beyond explicit judgment. Like Richard Dreyfuss, the superb young actor who plays him, Richler is not afraid to make Buddy unlikable or even sometimes gross. Special attention should also be paid to one of Duddy’s most elaborate schemes: hiring a perennially drunken and pompous British film maker in exile to make bar mitzvah movies for doting parents. The film maker is played by Denholm Elliott, who is hilariously disheveled and polluted nearly past the point of pretension, a characterization of enormous comic skill. His bar mitzvah production is a triumphant, unconscious (on his part) parody combining the most tiresome features of the anthropological and popular front documentaries of another time. Beethoven’s Fifth provides the musical score, Elliott himself the pompous narration, holding together shots of the ceremony itself, African puberty rituals and Nazis on the march—all pottily proving that little Bernie Farber, the junk dealer’s son, stands at the confluence of mighty historical forces.

Director Ted Kotcheff renders everything in a kind of documentary naturalism that sometimes weakens a wild sense of exuberance. But at its best, and that is most of the time, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is fierce and clear-eyed, and shows toward its hero much the same attitude displayed by his grandfather—knowing but still affectionate. “Jay Cocks

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