The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
"The Talkies" The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kraritz (:aliprnia Split J BE LOVEABLE. you have to start out being ved. There is no other route, and trying e other routes leads to being not only unveahle, but...
...And they do not hi a bit...
...Segal and Gould will bet on anything...
...The movie helps us to understand about people around us, if not about ourselves...
...Duddy has passed on into the folklore of those who will come after him and who will also try to win love and appreciation by becoming a success and running roughshod over the very people whose love they want to win...
...And in clawing his way ), he has to become progressively more irdened and unloveable, and thus more stant from his original goal...
...The father and a rich uncle have always favored Duddy's older brother and treated Duddy as if he did not count...
...He seeks power and oney, thinking they will generate love, it they do not...
...He goes to work as a waiter at the Canadian equivalent of the Catskills...
...So Duddy will become father to himself and show everyone...
...Elliott Gould, on the other hand, has no pretensions of being anything other than a gambling addict...
...And if his portrayals do not reach so deep as those in Duddy Kravitz, and if they are not as trenchant, they are at least a form of painless learning...
...He returns to Montreal after the summer and begins to work on his project—acquiring the lake and the land surrounding it...
...Similarly, Duddy's relations with the French-Canadian girl are pitiful...
...a creep, but looks at him td tries to show how he got that way, id how he would like to be different...
...Segal is at first diverted by Gould's living with two Las Vegas hookers, but he later comes to be repelled by it and to return his attention only to the game...
...His portrayal of the life of a detective in The Long Goodbye was the finest detective story ever on film...
...In these ti movies our own needs and wants a shown to us as if in a funhouse They are distorted, but they are bet than no mirror at all...
...But then he sees the whole thing about to fall apart and can only save his scheme by stealing from the now crippled epileptic hillbilly...
...She tries desperately to show him that he is worthy as himself, regardless of his accomplishments...
...George Segal is a superficially respectable magazine writer and only goes off on a gambling bender occasionally—at first...
...and he bought a whole lake, and that was just his start...
...That in itself is interesting, but Altman has done his director's job so well as to make it more than that...
...the hustler, the Sammy ick character that we all know and dease...
...But he is simply too driven to respond, and she eventually leaves him over disgust with his theft from the cripple...
...He involves everyone he can—his girlfriend, a pathetic epileptic hillbilly, friends, even his grudging father...
...When the two men encounter each other at a casino, they strike up a fast friendship...
...He has directed brilliantly, making the most effective use of soundtrack that I can remember...
...Even the possibility of losing becomes hypnotic...
...The men simply gamble and then stop, then gamble some more, then stop, then repeat the pattern over and over again...
...Affection, his job, his possessions, all are immaterial compared to the bet, when he is in a betting mood, which becomes always...
...is the best film that has been ade to date on the etiology and ontology the pusher...
...His newest effort, California Split, is several notches below that, but is still a fine piece of work in the same vein...
...They are oblivious to their surroundings so long as gambling is going on...
...Duddy asks his father in one of the movie's many affecting scenes...
...Because he has !ver known about being loved, he does )t know how to love, and when he tries get love he cannot give anything subantial in return...
...Duddy Kravitz...
...There is a tinge of sorrow coloring the entire process...
...At another point Duddy is talking to his dying uncle, to whom he is acting with uncharacteristic toughness, considering that the uncle has just offered him a large amount of money to look after his business...
...It is in the act of hazarding something upon chance that all of the potentialities for human fulfillment seem to be concentrated...
...Duddy Kravitz is the son of a cabdriver hose wife died when Duddy was a baby...
...At the beginning of the movie, the camera homes in on Duddy's father as he sits in a corner bar telling about a boyhood acquaintance who has become a rich mobster...
...id she love me...
...For Gould and Segal, all time between gambling is simply void, even though they recognize you cannot gamble all of the time...
...Together they give us a compassionate picture of the s.o.b...
...The men and director Altman take us on a plotless but fascinating tour of the gambling spots and dives along the Las Vegas–Los Angeles axis...
...Duddy explains why: "You always had time for my brother, but you never had time for me...
...Richard Dreyfuss, of American Graffitti fame, plays Duddy...
...Kravitz and Gould and Segal E haunted characters, living in a haunt world, peopled by obsessions and comp' sions that are not ordinary in their mea of expressions, although fundamental ordinary and common...
...This movie is about a few weeks in the lives of two compulsive gamblers...
...There is no other route, and trying e other routes leads to being not only unveahle, but unlovely...
...He even becomes involved in drug smuggling very briefly...
...But while this repetitious and ineluctable nightmare of obsession occasionally grows tedious, it is by and large a gripping vision of the landscape of the haunted and obsessed person...
...It is reported that Altman used up sixteen microphones in a single scene pick up the noise...
...That is the hard sson that David "Duddy" Kravitz erns, to his pain and the heartache of e people around him in The Apprenticeip of Duddy Kravitz...
...The movie ends with the twentyyear-old entrepreneur Duddy strutting down the street with the voice of his father saying, "Now, Duddy was no genius in school, but when he got out, he pulled every string he could get, yeah...
...Every spot, every event, every person becomes something tobe cranked into the odds-making machine which is in the gambler's head...
...Thereis a constant background of conversatio street noise, casino babble, bar chant anything which gives the impression constant movement through places whe people are alive...
...a Canadian film about young Jewish man on the make in poster Montreal...
...Even sex becomes unimportant compared to the possibilities of winning...
...It is an old story in real life, but it hard-ever shows up in movies...
...The other waiters, who are all college boys, make cruel fun of Duddy and torment him with tricks...
...Robert Altman also likes to tell us about compulsion while entertaining us...
...But Duddy plods on, being alternately tough and servile, and gets more tips than anyone else...
...It is the best film of this kind be-!use it does not simply take Duddy -avitz as he is...
...A young man ts out to make the world love him and spect him because his family did not hen he was a child...
...as a human being and they show us how he got that way...
...The screenplay is based on a book by Mordecai Richter and the direction is by Ted Kotcheff...
...He seeks solace with a French-Canadian maid, but when she shows him her secret hideaway lake, all he can think about is how great it would be to subdivide its shoreline...
...He has, at age eighteen, lost the ability to love...
...He does not work, his clothes hang on him like a scarecrow, and he has no fixed address...
...At one point, Duddy has to clean up after his older brother's messes, for example, while his older brother gets the love and admiration and Duddy gets left with the refuse...
...It is a technique be rowed from rock records, but it wort There is a feeling of perpetual moth throughout the movie,' as if the ener that was focused at the moment of the had always been charging the atmo phere, so that it could be gathered up Gould's and Segal's presence, and th discharged in the bet...
Vol. 8 • November 1974 • No. 2
