Richard Dreyfus

  • Nuts (1987)

    Nuts (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, July 2020) Either I saw Nuts before (likely!) or the plot points are now commonplace, because I had a strong impression of déjà vu while watching this courtroom thriller. Featuring Barbra Streisand as a quick-to-anger high-class prostitute who is accused of murder, much of the film consists in determining whether she is apt to go on trial. Perhaps its biggest assets are the two headliners: Streisand is watchable no matter the circumstances, and Richard Dreyfus was seemingly everywhere at the time that Nuts was shot and his performance shows why. (On the other hand, having Leslie Neilsen in one of his last dramatic roles as an abusive john definitely doesn’t play as well to later generations used to his comic roles.) There are a few good moments here and there (although the big “click” in the lawyer’s head definitely felt predictable and formulaic), but Nuts doesn’t have a clear focus on what it’s trying to do. For one thing, it plays with the question of craziness or not, but in flashbacks it seems all too ready to reassure the audience that there is no question there. Troublingly, the morality of the film revolves around Streisand’s protagonist, because it insists that she’s a good person even though the way she behaves would not be tolerated in any family, workplace or friendship. I wonder how much the passing of years has exposed the weaknesses of the film, since much of the stuff here seems fairly familiar: contemporary reviews called Nuts daring, whereas it feels more like a movie of the week now.

  • The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974)

    The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a classic of Canadian literature (widely acclaimed, often cited on best-of lists, taught in schools, etc.), and its reading is almost mandatory if you want to claim that you know anything about CanLit. The film adaptation is along the same lines for Canadian film, perhaps even more so given that it was one of the first commercially and critically successful films that blended regional themes and settings to produce a film that was unquestionably Canadian. For modern viewers, there’s some added attraction in seeing a very young Richard Dreyfus in the leading role, Dennis Quaid in a supporting role and (for French-Canadian film fans) a young and surprisingly attractive Micheline Lanctot. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz takes us, as did the novel, into Montréal’s anglophone Jewish community. It’s uneven, and almost frustrating by design (it is, after all, blatantly about a young man’s coming of age and these things don’t always go smoothly) but it does have a few high points—including a comic set-piece about an exceptionally pretentious bar mitzvah video documentary. The French-Canadian dub has a weird mixture of formal and informal French, which makes sense given the setting (and how Micheline Lanctot dubs her own lines in her very distinctive voice) but still rings a bit weird to viewers used to a more consistent level of language.