Word: kravitz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...down the line David Kravitz, faculty adviser to the Penn State team, outlines the virtues of a modified 1975 Honda CVCC that students have converted into a diesel. The rival University of Pennsylvania crew has taken a Rabbit diesel, added a turbocharger to burn fuel more efficiently and stuck it in an elongated Honda chassis designed to seat six passengers. Says a team member: "We call it aDachshonda." The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, team has put a two-cylinder, 25-h.p. Onan industrial engine (usually used to power an electric generator) into a British Austin Mini, added an electronic microprocessor...
...Carefully mapping out his life, the Cassius side of Dreyfuss planned on ten years of acting apprenticeship. But before he could get started, he says, in a voice that wavers somewhere between woe and wonder, "the movies happened-boom! boom! boom!" American Graffiti led to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which led to Jaws-which led to the beginning of a breakdown. The movie was just a big fish story, says Dreyfuss, and he "felt like a whore" acting...
...billing and top dollar in Hollywood, but it has always been hard to accept him as a top movie actor. Though his brash energy holds the screen, Dreyfuss has built most of his characters from a single emotion-an intense comic anguish. At his best-in American Graffiti, Duddy Kravitz and Close Encounters-he can be ruefully witty and vulnerable. His jittery neuroticism keeps an audience guessing whether he might really fall apart. But there is also a persistent feeling that he is hiding behind a pat routine. When Dreyfuss portrays the same boyish insecurities in role after role...
STILL, MOST of the blame for stereotypic characterization belongs to director Kotcheff and his scriptwriter Mordecai Richler, the same team responsible for the superior The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. By choosing the names Dick and Jane (and Billy for their child, Spot for their dog), Richler intends to present a typical family. At one point, Dick shouts that he won't be destroyed, because he represents the American middle class. But this conception of the middle class appears ludicrous, unless Richler wishes to depict the average Beverly Hills household, replete with swimming pool and cabana. It's difficult to sympathize...
...fairy tale, not a cutting satire. Neither the bullets nor the issues are real. Dick and Jane pick only safe targets; they knock over a telephone company office and win a round of applause from the queue of bill payers. Briskly propelled by Director Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), they skim through their adventures as innocently as a pair of prankish collegians. The only laws they are unable to flout are the iron laws of comic contrivance. They must, it seems, receive an implausible invitation to a party at the offices of the firm that fired Dick, for only...