The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Duddy Kravitz, growing up in the Jewish working-class quarter of Montreal, fastens on something his grandfather said: a man without land is nobody. He sets out to raise the money to buy the ground around a lake and spares nobody on the way. The film is not interested in the rise of an ambitious boy. It is interested in who pays for that ambition: Duddy spends his girlfriend, his friend, and a disabled man who trusted him, one after another. It does not make him likeable but it does make him legible. The form is loud and alive: crowded neighbourhood scenes, fast dialogue, comedy standing right next to cruelty. The source is Mordecai Richler's 1959 novel; Richler wrote the screenplay with Lionel Chetwynd, and it became one of the first Canadian features to take an Oscar nomination for writing. Ted Kotcheff directed. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1974. Richard Dreyfuss leads, with Randy Quaid in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like character studies and North American independent cinema of the seventies. Who it is not for: anyone in search of a warm hero. Duddy learns nothing even at the end, and the film leaves that deliberately unresolved.