Error rating book. Refresh and try again. William 's review May 01, Certainly a lively read. Both are stories of the children of Jewish immigrants who go a bit over the top in their drive to succeed. There is some very good writing here, both detailed descriptions of scenes and some exceptional humor. The bar mitzvah filming episode is priceless. But the people in the story are to a large extent a bit flat and one-dimensional, and somehow at the end I did not feel the book had taken me anywhere.
By the time he's twenty, he's something. It's a story of ambition and greed, with a hero that will stop at almost nothing by the movie's end, Duddy has succeeded in alienating the girl who loves him, has lost all his friends, has brought his grandfather to despair, and has paralyzed his most loyal employee.
And yet we like Duddy, with a kind of exasperation, because we get some notion of the hungers that drive him, and because nobody suffers at his hands more than he does himself. But Duddy doesn't exactly get to Hollywood.
He runs across a blacklisted, alcoholic American director, in exile from Hollywood during the dark days of McCarthyism the film is set somewhere in the late s and early s. Duddy forms a movie production company Dudley Kane Productions, inevitably , hires the director, and produces films of bar mitzvahs. Their first production, shown in its entirety, is a lunatic montage of off-the-wall images that have no perceptible relevance to the bar mitzvah itself; the director arguably got himself drunk and spliced together stock footage after the opening temple scenes played over Beethoven's Fifth.
But Duddy's client is somewhat dazedly pleased by the film, and Duddy is off and running. His ambition is to own land.
During a summer spent as a waiter at a resort, he finds a beautiful, half-hidden lake. He determines to buy it and develop it, and his dream is shared by a plain-pretty French Canadian girl who is a maid at the resort. They fall into love. Willy says: 'Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want'; This was how Doodle died, but he never stopped loving his brother.
The reason Doodle kept up with the competitive antics of his brother was to gain a sense of worth and belonging within his family. He finishes the field and does everything he is told to do without question because his need to see his father is so great that he doesn't care if he appears normal or if his reputation of being a good farmer is damaged. He is willing to look crazy, watching and talking to an empty field and appearing crazy to his wife's family as well This quot shows that he has developed a quot with a deep meaning and covered it up with an easy explanation which he follows with saying that page 6 "He, of course, was Shoeless Joe Jackson" even tho he deep down knows that "He" is his father.
He says this to himself as a way of not getting his hopes up. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. In our own small way, I mean. The main three people who manipulate Duddy, and also give insight into his character, are his grandfather Simcha Kravitz , his older brother Lennie Kravitz, and his Uncle Benjy. Wealth is what Duddy is led to strive for by his grandfather.
Simcha Kravitz is the sole person who has believed in Duddy his whole lifetime, when others just considered him an unintelligent troublemaker. Duddy will lie, cheat, and steal from even his best friends. Outside the teeming Jewish milieu of catered affairs and convenient fraud, the audience is caught between two equally unattractive extremes—a stolid and vituperatively bigoted French-Canadian peasantry and the genteel bloodlessness of the WASP aristocracy, safely ensconced above the rabble in their Westmount mansions.
Buddy establishes a company to film documentaries of Bar Mitzvahs and weddings. He hires a drunken, blacklisted film director named John Friar played as a sodden Etonian by Denholm Elliott, who almost walks away with the movie. It is a marvelous parody of avant-garde technique and pretensions.
He captures a sense of post-WW2 filmmaking in his grainy, high-contrast color photography. This in turn lends a naturalistic flavor to many of the external shots of St. Urbain Street. For Buddy will venture beyond the Jewish confines of hustling a roulette game in the resorts or finessing his movie deals. Dreyfuss portrays Buddy as a pudgy, hyperkinetic hustler, constantly sweating, scratching, and twitching.
But despite his nervousness, Duddy at times has a charmingly boyish Teddy Bear appearance.
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