Word: montreal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...loosely regulated. It was a system, though, that seemed to work. The quiet was shattered last month with the collapse of two of Canada's 14 banks. They were the country's first bank failures in 62 years. Last week a financial crisis struck a third bank, the Montreal-based Mercantile Bank of Canada, the country's eighth largest, with assets of $4.4 billion (Canadian dollars). Mercantile, which is 24% owned by New York-based Citicorp, has been facing a severe cash squeeze. Investors who would normally buy Mercantile's commercial paper have been buying securities elsewhere. Their lack...
SCHLOCK IS A MISUNDERSTOOD art, especially in the hands of Mordecai Richler, Montreal novelist and author of the screenplay for the new film, Joshua Then and Now. After the following hatchet job, I daresay you'll agree...
...here is where Joshua Then and Now comes in. Richler's Joshua is the fact-based story of a poor Jewish writer growing up in Montreal who, by pluck and a marriage above his station, rises to most-envied-status to live among wealthy WASPs in the city's posh suburb of Westmount...
...trouble is, Richler can't make fun of the condition because he suffers from it. He harbors so much anger, presumably owing to his own mother, or to his own miserable upbringing in Montreal, that his novel gets bogged down by sheer malice. The fictional Joshua's mother is absurd--a vain, floozy stripper--and his coarse father (adequately played by Alan Arkin, in the film's only good performance) lives a cliche. Richler's story of Jewish lust/angst was better served by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint...
...fair, though, blame for its demise should be spread among several conspirators. Director Ted Kotcheff greedily sought to corner Quebec's French-Canadian market (Joshua was made and expected to flourish in Montreal) by casting Gabrielle Lazure, a French-Canadian starlet, in the lead role of Joshua's whitebread bedmate. This idea backfired, however, because the real Lazure has a strong accent, immediately conspicuous to the Montreal ear. To patch this up, her lines have been dubbed by a monotoned off-screen actress whose voice doesn't at all sound like it comes from Lazure's body. Plainly, a huge...