Ted Kotcheff’s Journey

The director of Wake in Fright (1971), The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), North Dallas Forty (1979), First Blood (1982), and Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) died late last week at the age of ninety-four. In his remembrance for the Guardian, Andrew Pulver notes that “Kotcheff’s work ranged from hard-hitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award winners and cult films.”

Born in Toronto to parents who had immigrated from Bulgaria, Kotcheff studied literature, graduated, landed a job as a stagehand at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and began working his way up. At twenty-four, he became the youngest director at the CBC. A few years later, he was off to Europe, and in Paris, he met and immediately hit it off with an aspiring novelist from Montreal, Mordecai Richler.

The pair decided to share a flat in London, where Richler would eventually see seven of his ten novels published and Kotcheff directed live broadcasts of television plays. During the 1958 transmission of one of them, James Forsyth’s postapocalyptic drama Underground, thirty-three-year-old actor Gareth Jones suffered a heart attack and died—offscreen, thank heavens—leaving Kotcheff and the rest of the cast to improvise their way to the closing credits.

Kotcheff directed James Mason, John Mills, and Herbert Lom in his first feature, the 1962 comedy Tiara Tahiti, and Richler wrote the screenplay for his follow-up, Life at the Top (1965), a sequel to Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1959). Kotcheff was also working in theater—he directed the original production of Lionel Bart’s musical Maggie May (1964)—while carrying on with his television work. In 1966, he directed Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice.

In the late 1960s, the Jamaican writer Evan Jones pitched Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fright to Kotcheff as “The Lost Weekend in the Outback.” Kotcheff read it and loved it, and shooting began in early 1970. When the new restoration premiered in Melbourne last summer, InReview’s Stephen Vagg wrote: “The 1971 movie was the first masterpiece of the revived Australian film industry—directed by a Canadian, from a script by a Jamaican, with a Norwegian producer and finance from an American fridge manufacturer.” The producer, by the way, was George Willoughby, and the production company was Westinghouse offshoot Group W Films.

English actor Gary Bond plays Australian school teacher John Grant, who’s assigned to a distant and desolate outpost where the men outnumber the women three to one. “Heat and barrenness are the backdrop, beer is the fuel, vicious kangaroo slaughter is the sport, and the laughter of brutal men taunts and lures as Grant’s psyche devolves spectacularly,” wrote Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times when the first restoration arrived in the States in 2012.

That restoration was selected by Martin Scorsese to screen in the Cannes Classics program in 2009. “Wake in Fright is a deeply—and I mean deeply—unsettling and disturbing movie,” Scorsese said at the time. “I saw it when it premiered at Cannes in 1971, and it left me speechless. Visually, dramatically, atmospherically, and psychologically, it’s beautifully calibrated and it gets under your skin one encounter at a time.” Scorsese was pleased that the film was “finally getting the exposure it deserves.”

Writing for Slant in 2012, John Semley found that the film’s “vision of masculine self-sufficiency is built around—and on, via Australia’s own bloody colonial history—an elemental violence. Here, an evening boozing session descends into a violent Greco-Roman brawl, property is capriciously trashed, male-bonding slopes into bullying homoeroticism. Kotcheff’s film may seem similar to Deliverance or Straw Dogs in its white-knuckle lensing of masculinity under backwater duress, but there’s a boozy Buñuelian surrealism draping the proceedings.”

In 2017, Kotcheff recalled the period in the late 1950s when Mordecai Richler spent two years completing his fourth novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Richler had Kotcheff read it the moment he’d finished typing the last page. Kotcheff spent that night reading The Apprenticeship in one sitting and—half joking, half not—promised to film an adaptation. He did, in 1961, for ITV’s Armchair Theatre, but it wouldn’t be until the fall of 1973 that shooting began on a proper feature.

Richard Dreyfuss—twenty-six at the time—plays Duddy, a Jewish eighteen-year-old wheeling and dealing in Montreal and determined to buy a picturesque lake and turn it into a resort. Critically acclaimed, the film won the Golden Bear in Berlin and became one of Canada’s biggest box-office hits. Richler’s screenplay scored an Oscar nomination and an award from the Writers Guild of America.

“What makes The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz great,” wrote Eric Hynes for Time Out in 2013, “is also what makes it exasperating—namely its nonjudgmental dedication to the character’s point of view, petty amoralities and all.” Kotcheff “uses Duddy’s abrasive charisma to illuminate the motivations and pitfalls of postwar Jewish enterprise, where self-ownership in a gentile’s world can feel like an act of vengeance. Somehow both ingratiating and repellant, Dreyfuss plays Duddy as a cackling force of nature, as shiksa-horny as Portnoy and as tragic as any striver left alone with everything he ever wanted.”

Then it was off to Hollywood, where Kotcheff directed Gregory Peck in Billy Two Hats (1974), George Segal and Jane Fonda in Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), and Segal and Jacqueline Bisset in Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978). Nick Nolte starred in North Dallas Forty as an aging wide receiver for a team that at the time looked an awful lot like the Dallas Cowboys.

In 2020, Rolling Stone placed North Dallas Forty at #17 on its list of the thirty best sports movies of all time. Bilge Ebiri wrote that “Kotcheff's down-and-dirty sports drama does double duty as a broad satire as it delves into the corrupt underbelly of professional football—the drugs, the sex, the backstabbing, and the bureaucratic incompetence. Back then, sports movies were generally meant to be rousing and inspirational. Here’s a movie that explodes all that—both an ode to and an interrogation of Seventies locker-room machismo, American style.”

For Filmmaker, Jim Hemphill spoke with Kotcheff in 2016 about First Blood, the first entry in a long-running franchise featuring Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo. “Though the sequels (which Kotcheff declined to direct) took the series in a more cartoonish direction,” wrote Hemphill, “the original First Blood remains a masterpiece of serious action filmmaking, a perfectly calibrated thrill machine made all the more suspenseful by its moments of contemplation and poignancy. Kotcheff’s use of the anamorphic frame is stunning in its dexterity, as he uses his widescreen compositions to both ratchet up tension and to convey the isolation of his central character, a Vietnam vet adrift in an unforgiving landscape. It’s a perfect example of what Kotcheff does best, intelligent but unpretentious, stylish but not self-conscious, and riveting but restrained.”

Last summer, Drew Gillis observed at the A.V. Club that “you’d never know that Weekend at Bernie’s was anything but a massive success based on the way people have talked about it for the past three-and-a-half decades; the film has been name-dropped and outright parodied in the biggest sitcoms on both sides of the millennium and has emerged every once in a while as a political ding.” Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman play low-level insurance company guys who desperately need to convince everyone they run into in the Hamptons that their dead boss is actually alive.

Weekend at Bernie’s barely turned a profit in 1989, and overall, the reviews were not great. But the film did find a champion in the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas, who called it “a one-joke comedy as fragile as a soap bubble.” The film “can’t in fact be accused of possessing so much as a shred of subtlety, but as a broad farce it’s not only cleverly sustained but frequently hilarious. What’s more, a weekend among the rich, the jaded, and the corrupt is just the right cup of tea for an acid social satirist such as Kotcheff.”

Interviewing Kotcheff for the New York Press in 2010, Simon Abrams found the director in a reflective mood. “Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz are my two best films,” said Kotcheff. “Those are the films I aspired to make. They encapsulated the visions I had of being a filmmaker . . . Usually when I look at my films, I’m hyper-critical. When I looked at Wake in Fright about a year ago: ‘Wow. What a vision, a Dantesque vision of life.’”