Word: dreyfusses
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...audience's comic reaction is a measure of both the movie's appeal and its failure as a moral statement. Duddy Kravitz is a thoroughly lovable character. Richard Dreyfuss is superb in his portrayal of the poor mischievous Jewish boy who sets out to make his mark after his hunched-over bearded grandfather tells him, "A man without land is a nobody." Motherless since the age of six, left to fend for himself by his taxi-cab driving father, ignored by his rich uncle, and taunted by his peers, Duddy determines to win the respect of his grandfather...
Richler, adapting his own novel, portrays Buddy with the kind of wisdom that goes beyond explicit judgment. Like Richard Dreyfuss, the superb young actor who plays him, Richler is not afraid to make Buddy unlikable or even sometimes gross. Special attention should also be paid to one of Duddy's most elaborate schemes: hiring a perennially drunken and pompous British film maker in exile to make bar mitzvah movies for doting parents. The film maker is played by Denholm Elliott, who is hilariously disheveled and polluted nearly past the point of pretension, a characterization of enormous comic skill...
...acting style he has extrapolated for himself out of his own memory and his great talent is a reserved, tentative thing that depends on his stores of introspection and secret turmoil. Newer actors, younger ones, are already doing something a little different. Robert De Niro (in Mean Streets), Richard Dreyfuss (in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) are working in a broader, larger style-no more daring than Nicholson's but more aggressive and open...
...small California town in 1962-the proper, if not the chronological, end of the 1950s-Graffiti provides a series of vignettes of the last night of summer. On the following day two of the local boys (Richard Dreyfuss and Ronny Howard) are set to leave for college. Howard and his girl (Cindy Williams) are surrogates for AIP's Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, the straight-arrow guy and his girl, the latter a believer in early marriage and eternal obligation. Comic relief is provided by Charlie Martin Smith as the sad sack, and a glimpse into the classic cruising...
...characters seem locked in-to careers, to whole lives. The only one who will break out is Dreyfuss, smarter and more sensitive than the others but careful not to show it. His high school teacher tells him of the time he left town to go to college but came back after only a semester ("I wasn't the competitive type"); the scene captures the slightly anxious self-deceptions that Dreyfuss's contemporaries will soon be using. Dreyfuss climbs aboard his plane for college still carrying a radio tuned to the favorite local station. The radio plays until...