Farber, the character who refers to the “white man,” at one point expounds on his business ethics to Duddy-on his being at “war,” and having to do dirty things so that his son won't have to (a rationalization which Duddy, with no son in sight, later adopts)-in a vein remarkably like that of Vito Corleone's in The Godfather though one senses of Farber, as of Monsieur Verdoux, that, despite his rationalizations, he loves this combat, and of Duddy, too, that, despite the explanations we're given, he does what he does because he's good at it and because he thrives on the entrepreneurial frenzy.
“Vulgar,” “pushy” Jews are seen wheeling and dealing, at work and at leisure (in a funny, shrewdly knowing sequence set in a summer resort), and, above all, heard talking. What makes The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz important as a film (whereas it is only commonplace as a novel) is just that, and things like it: the fact that the film gives a voice to characters and depicts a milieu not heard or seen in films before-at least, not seen depicted with such familiar intimacy and such lack of defensiveness. And yet, though Richler's script has transferred intact many of the novel's faults to the film (where director Ted Kotcheff, occasionally mistaking loudness for liveliness, adds a few of his own), the film that's been made from it has an impact compared to which its faults recede into irrelevance.Īt one point in the film (as I recall, during the course of a conspiratorial conversation between Duddy, the film's protagonist, and a hustling Jewish businessman who takes him under his wing), there's a reference to “the white man”-meaning the Gentile-a phrase I was surprised to find I recalled having heard somewhere in the dim recesses of my childhood. One has only to compare the Canadian sections of Saul Bellow's Herzog, with their memorable evocation of the immigrant experience and genuinely tragic account of the entrepreneurial failures of Herzog's father, to see how little Richler has got from like materials.
Telling the story of an ambitious young man, a budding entrepreneur, on the make in Montreal's Jewish ghetto, circa 1948, Mordecai Richler's novel, I thought, found its literary level with the Wouks and Weidmans Sammy runs indefatigably all right, but, aside from the most tritely familiar signposts (he lacked love), one never knows why, and the subplot by which we're supposed to measure his moral failure (he's indirectly responsible for the crippling of an innocently trusting epileptic who befriends him, and whom he subsequently cheats out of some money) is of a quite irredeemable banality. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a lumpy, styleless film made from a lumpy, styleless novel, yet it seems to me important.
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