The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (film)

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
Produced by John Kemeny[1]
Screenplay by Lionel Chetwynd
Based on The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by
Mordecai Richler
Starring Richard Dreyfuss
Micheline Lanctôt
Jack Warden
Randy Quaid
Music by Stanley Myers
Andrew Powell
Cinematography Brian West
Edited by Thom Noble
Production
company
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
Release dates
 April 11, 1974 (1974-04-11)
Running time
 120 minutes
Country Canada
Language English
Budget $911,000 (Canadian)[1]
Box office $1.7 million[2]

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a 1974 Canadian comedy-drama film directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Richard Dreyfuss. It is based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Mordecai Richler.

Plot

Duddy Kravitz (Richard Dreyfuss) is a brash, restless young Jewish man growing up poor in Montreal, Canada. His taxi driver father Max (Jack Warden) and his rich uncle Benjy (Joseph Wiseman) are very proud of Duddy's older brother Lenny, whom Benjy is putting through medical school. Only his grandfather (Zvee Scooler) shows the motherless Duddy any attention.

Duddy gets a summer job as a waiter at a Jewish resort hotel in the Laurentian Mountains. His hustle, energy and coarse manners irritate condescending college student and fellow waiter Irwin. Irwin gets his girlfriend Linda, the daughter of the hotel's owner, to persuade Duddy to stage a clandestine roulette game. Unbeknownst to Duddy, the roulette wheel is crooked, and he loses his entire $300 earnings to Irwin and some hotel guests. Fortunately for Duddy, the other waiters find out and make Irwin give back the money. Unaware of this, the hotel guests, led by Farber, feel bad and give him a further $500 (the film was shot in 1974; the amounts in 2016 currency are $1470 and $2,451 respectively).

Duddy starts a serious relationship with another hotel employee, French-Canadian Yvette (Micheline Lanctôt). One day, she takes him on a picnic beside a lake. Duddy is stunned by the beauty of the setting, and his ambition crystallizes: taking to heart his grandfather Zeyta's maxim that "a man without land is nobody", he decides he will buy all the property around the lake and develop it. Because the current owners might not want to sell to a Jew, he gets Yvette to front for him.

Duddy sets out to raise the money he needs. He hires blacklisted, alcoholic American director Friar (Denholm Elliott) to film weddings and bar mitzvahs. His first customer is Farber, who drives a hard bargain. If he does not like the result, he will not pay. Despite Friar's artistic pretensions, the film is a success, and more orders are quickly forthcoming.

However, when a piece of land comes up for sale, Duddy does not have enough money. He begs his father to get him an appointment with his friend Dingleman, "the Boy Wonder", a rich, successful businessman-cum-gangster who had equally humble beginnings. Dingleman turns down his request for a loan but later invites him to discuss his scheme on a train to New York. It turns out that Dingleman just wants a drug mule to unknowingly take the risk of smuggling heroin.

On the train, Duddy meets good-natured Virgil (Randy Quaid) and offers to buy his pinball machines, which are illegal in the United States. When Virgil shows up, Duddy does not have enough money to pay him, so Duddy hires Virgil as a truck driver, even though he has epilepsy. Tragedy strikes when Virgil has a seizure while driving and crashes; he is left permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Duddy is distraught and guilt-ridden. Blaming Duddy, Yvette leaves him to care for Virgil.

Duddy becomes alarmed when Dingleman finds out about his lake. When the last piece of property Duddy needs comes on the market, Dingleman bids for it. Desperate, Duddy forges Virgil's signature on a check to buy the land, leading to a final rupture with Yvette and Virgil.

Undeterred, Duddy proudly takes Max, Lenny and his grandfather to see his property. When Dingleman shows up to offer to raise the financing for its development, Duddy mocks him and ejects him from his land. Duddy's grandfather,m however, refuses to pick out a plot for his farm; Yvette told him what Duddy did to get it. He tries but fails to reconcile with her, and she tells him that she never wishes to see him again. The final scene of the film, however, shows Duddy winning the prestige of having a tab at the local diner, and his father boasting about how his son made it.

Cast

Production

The film was actually Kotcheff's second adaptation of Richler's 1959 novel. In 1961, he had directed a television play for ITV's Armchair Theatre based on Kravitz, with Hugh Futcher in the title role.

American producer Samuel Z. Arkoff was approached to make the film, but wanted to turn Duddy into a Greek character.[3]

Few Canadians were cast in major roles, for box office and artistic reasons.[3]

Legacy

Duddy Kravitz has an important place in Canadian film history because it was the most commercially successful Canadian film ever made at the time of its release, and has thus been described as a 'coming of age' for Canadian cinema.[4] The film has been designated and preserved as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of Canada’s audio-visual heritage.[5] The Toronto International Film Festival ranked it in the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time twice, in 1984 and 1993.[6]

In the period between shooting Duddy Kravitz and actually seeing the completed movie, Richard Dreyfuss was offered, and turned down, the role of Matt Hooper in Jaws;[7] having reading the script he decided that it was a film he would "rather watch than be in". After he had seen the final cut of Kravitz, however, Dreyfuss felt his performance was so bad that it could potentially end his movie career. Discovering that the role of Hooper had still not been cast, he jumped at it to ensure that he was safely under contract to make another movie before anybody at Universal heard any negative press about Kravitz.

It was shown as part of the Cannes Classics section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.[8]

Prizes

Nominations

Stage adaptation

In 1987, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was adapted into a musical for the New York stage, directed by Austin Pendleton. A newly updated version of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (musical) had its world premiere in Montreal with music by Alan Menken, book and lyrics by David Spencer and directed by Pendleton

References

  1. 1 2 Knelman, Martin (16 February 2013). "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz gets new life". Toronto Star. Retrieved 17 February 2013.
  2. ↑ Richard Nowell, Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle Continuum, 2011 p 258
  3. 1 2 Howell, Peter (22 May 2013). "Ted Kotcheff finally brings The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz to Cannes". Toronto Star.
  4. ↑ George Melnyk, One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 118.
  5. ↑
  6. ↑ "Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time", The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2012, URL accessed 28 April 2013.
  7. ↑ Spotlight on Location: The Making of Jaws, Jaws 30th Anniversary DVD documentary, [2005]
  8. ↑ "Cannes Classics 2013 line-up unveiled". Screen Daily. Retrieved 2013-04-30.
  9. ↑ "Berlinale 1974: Prize Winners". berlinale.de. Retrieved 2010-07-02.
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