The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Duddy Kravitz grew up with stories about the Boy Wonder. The Wonder, whose real name was Dingleman, began his life by picking up bus transfers off the street and selling them for three cents apiece. When he had a quarter, he got into a gin game and ran it up to ten dollars; then he parlayed that into a fortune through poker games and fly by night investments, and came home (so goes the legend) in a chauffeured limousine with his own string of racehorses. All from a handful of lousy three cent bus transfers!

Duddy figures he can top this when we meet him at sixteen as a Jewish kid from Montreal whose mother is dead and whose father drives a cab and does a little part-time pimping to put the older son through medical school. The Boy Wonder was one of his father’s childhood pals; Duddy has heard the story so many times that he simply assumes it must be true and that therefore the man will naturally be worth at least a million dollars by the time he’s twenty. He’s right: by twenty or so the man is something.

“The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” is an oddly touching breakneck movie. It is about ambition and greed, with almost no-holds-barred heroism (by the film’s end Duddy has managed to alienate the girl who loves him, lose all his friends, bring his grandfather to despair, and paralyze his most loyal employee). But we like him anyway, out of some understanding for those hungers which drive us all on wild goose chases after impossible dreams and because nobody else ever suffers half as much from them as we do ourselves.

It’s Canada’s answer to “What Makes Sammy Run?” Duddy Kravitz even gets into film making like Budd Schulberg’s hero but not exactly Hollywood. He encounters an alcoholic blacklisted American director who is living in exile during the dark days of McCarthyism (the film was set somewhere around the late 1940s or early 1950s).

Duddy starts a movie production company (Dudley Kane Productions, naturally), hires the director and they make films of bar mitzvahs. Their first production, shown in full, is a complete montage of lunatic off the wall images which bear no discernible relationship to one another or to anything else including the bar mitzvah itself; the guy probably got drunk and spliced together stock footage after he saw that opening temple scene played over Beethoven’s Fifth but Duddy’s customer is satisfied with it (in fact, somewhat stupefied), so Duddy is launched.

His goal is to get land. “Without land, a person is nothing,” his grandfather has told him. He works as a waiter in a resort for the summer and finds a beautiful lake that no one knows about. He decides that he wants to buy it and make it bigger, and so does a pretty ugly French-Canadian maid at the resort who falls in love with him.

Or, really, she loves him and Duddy loves having her slightly off center in his view of himself being loved by her in his future life. The ways in which he finally succeeds in driving her away, the things he does to make himself miserable before he’s even twenty-one, are played against this series of get-rich-fast schemes (during one of which he not only meets the real Boy Wonder but unknowingly smuggles heroin across the border for him).

It was based on a novel by Mordecai Richler and until recently was the most successful film ever made in Canada (a country that still seems farther away than any place in Europe to many Americans). It was shot on location with great liveliness and vibrancy and lots of little details seen as Duddy sees them.

It has an amazing number of character parts (I’ve mentioned only a few). It’s too loose here and there, sometimes too easy, to be a great movie; but it’s good fun and it makes us feel that maybe Duddy Kravitz will come through after all if he ever grows up.

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