Word: richler
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Screenplay by MORDECAI RICHLER...
...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...
...Richler (Banfam...
...Richler carries out the investigation with unflagging scatological zest and a deadly, unsparing eye. At the London film colony's weekly softball game, the players' first wives come to jeer, and the scores and strikeouts have more to do with careers and sex than with the game. On Montreal's St. Urbain Street, while sitting in mourning for Jake's father, friends and relatives pass around vulgarities and insults along with the cake. Canadian intellectuals are "reared to believe in the cultural thinness of their own blood. Anemia is their heritage." In gum-gray England...
Horseman offers the secondary pleasure of watching a writer just as he is hitting full stride. Richler, who was born in Montreal, is one of Canadian culture's leading unrepentant truants. He has written five previous novels. Their themes range from sociopolitical consciousness (The Acrobats) through pungently realistic picaresques of Montreal Jewish life (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) to outrageous expatriate satire (Cocksure). Finally, at 40, Richler has brought all these strains together. The result is a resounding war cry, love song and apologia for the fundamentally decent man who can fumble through the depravity of the times...