The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a lumpy, styleless film made from a lumpy, styleless novel, yet it seems to me important. 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. 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. 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.

At 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. 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. “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. 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.

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Is the film's picture of this scheming Jewish hustler who is its protagonist, however contrasted with portraits of Jews unlike him, a pernicious public airing of dirty laundry? Is it “bad for the Jews”? I can't agree with Rabbi Dan Isaac who recently claimed in the pages of the New York Times that it is and that it gives aid and comfort to the anti-Semite, any more than I can believe that Richard Pryor's characterizations of drunk and shiftless “niggers” play into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan; the film's materials are too much seen from the inside to be appropriated by an enemy camp. Moreover—and it's this more than anything else which gives the film its distinction—this world of Jewish moneymaking and vulgarity is seen with something approaching affection: the guests at the resort, Farber, even Duddy—they and their world are accepted by the film as its own. The film's Duddy is in fact more likable than the novel's, in part because of the personal qualities Richard Dreyfuss brings to the role (though almost any actor's presence would tend to “humanize” the character as written); but more important in this connection has been the elimination in the film of the novel's opening section, which shows Duddy, younger than when we meet him in the film and playing a part in the death of the invalid wife of one of his teachers, in a particularly unfavorable light. Yet the elimination of this opening seems to me to improve on the novel, both because the section is unsuccessful in itself and because it seems in some ways not organically connected to the Duddy of later on, rather as if Richler were trying to convince himself to like his protagonist less.

Rabbi Isaac, in support of his case, makes much of the Bar Mitzvah scene in the film. But in fact there is no Bar Mitzvah scene in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, only a pretentiously arty “documentary” film of a Bar Mitzvah made by a blacklisted director named Friar whom Duddy employs for his fledgling film-production company (“Dudley Kane Enterprises”), and this director (along with Joe Silver's Farber, the most freshly conceived, sharply etched, and best acted—by Denholm Elliott—of the film's characters) is portrayed as a pompous ass. The documentary is, in its fatuous way, anti-Semitic, though in contrast to the stinging (self-) hatred of the Bar Mitzvah scene in the film of Goodbye Columbus, what Richler is satirizing is plainly not the Bar Mitzvah itself but the pretensions of the director, whose anti-Semitism, such as it is, is impossible to separate from his posturing. (“I've sold my soul to the Hebrews,” he mock-solemnly bemoans at one point, slapping himself on the cheek. “Shame on me. Shame, shame.”) When Friar says to Duddy, “Ah, Kravitz, come to collect your pound of flesh, I suppose,” a remark Rabbi Isaac adduces in support of his contention that the movie's image of Duddy gives us a contemporary Shylock, the fact is that the director has just previously cheated Duddy out of several hundred dollars, and is, by his drunkenness, jeopardizing the livelihood that Duddy has made for himself by his wits and industry.

Indeed, it isn't the Duddys and Farbers who are the target of the film's (and book's) animus, but, to an almost disturbing degree, just those other Jews who disdain or affect superiority to them. It is Friar (and, in the novel, a circle of literary intellectuals) who exploits Duddy, and not the reverse. Duddy's wealthy, socialism-espousing Uncle Benjy, whose favoring of Duddy's older brother is supposedly a key factor in shaping Duddy's development, is depicted as an impotent alcoholic who ends up regretting his rejection of Duddy and seeing his virtues. And the intelligent brother, Lennie, whom the uncle supports through medical school (Duddy's father, a widower, ekes out a living as a taxi driver and occasional pimp) is shown to be (like most of the other college students who work as waiters, with Duddy, at the summer resort) a snob and a weakling, who has to be bailed out by Duddy, with his fierce family loyalties, when Lennie's assimilationist social climbing leads him to being used by some Gentiles and lands him in a jam. It's the Duddys and Farbers who make the world go round, and buy their dependents the luxury of their high-mindedness, Richler seems to be saying, and, though he may not be saying this with complete consciousness, he has allowed Duddy a ringing defense when he asks the now dying Benjy why the old man never had time for him, and his uncle replies, “Because you're a pusherke. A little Jew-boy on the make. Guys like you make me sick and ashamed.” “You lousy, intelligent people!” Duddy explodes. “You lying sons of bitches with your books and your socialism and your sneers. . . . Writing and reading books that make fun of people like me. . . . It's easy for you to sit here and ridicule and make superior little jokes because you know more than me, but what about a helping hand? When did you ever put yourself out one inch for me? . . . You think I should be running after something else besides money? Good. Tell me what. Tell me, you bastard.”

Andrew Sarris has aptly remarked on the improbable self-consciousness of that “people like me,” in which one hears not Duddy's voice but Richler's. I don't mean to suggest that The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is in any simple sense an apologetic for Duddy, whose conniving earns him, by the end, the disapprobation of his beloved grandfather (a stock figure of old-country folk-wisdom who seems to have strayed in from a production of Fiddler on the Roof), and who, having driven his best friends from him, is seen at last, for all his furious activity, as only a big fish in a little pond. But it isn't an apology either. Duddy is portrayed, warts and all, and flung into the teeth of those who would scorn him. And though this spectacle is quintessentially by, about, and for Jews, the sensibility which informs it is at once sufficiently strong in its ethnic ties and secure in its relations to the world at large to relieve one of the least anxiety about having it seen by (and, for that matter, flung into the teeth of) the white man.