To savage the age, Richler cut straight into its pop heart: the movie industry. Cocksure rips the fantasies peddled by the producers of visual trash. When the ultimate junk dealer, the character known as Star Maker, a transsexual movie mogul who cannibalizes body parts to prolong his life, is told to go have sex with himself, he decides that this is a terrific idea. Pregnant from his own seed, he is asked if he/she should perhaps get married. “But, my dear child,” Star Maker answers, “I love only me.” The book was both a scandal and a success when it appeared in 1968 — the author’s first bestseller. Offers of options to carve a film from the grotesquery — a movie that would be yet another form of autoeroticism — poured in.
Richler knew the world he was satirizing, having observed and worked in it since shortly after his arrival in England. From a lowly reader for a studio who had made a quick study of the craft by buying a collection of screenplays by Graham Greene, he advanced to doctoring existing scripts, including a makeover of the landmark 1959 film Room at the Top. From the start the young writer was adept and unpretentious, holding few illusions about any relationship between movies and art. “Even under the most ideal circumstances,” he wrote in an essay from the period, “film is not a writer’s medium.”
Movies, in short, mattered to Mordecai Richler, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that a cheque for a few weeks’ work on a film generally surpassed the advances garnered for a novel that took years to write. His own books had come close to being filmed before, in particular 1959’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and a fellow expat, Norman Jewison, was soon to option his 1963 satire, The Incomparable Atuk. All six of the novels Richler had written, briskly plotted and driven by dialogue, were certainly filmable.
Then came St. Urbain’s Horseman. Though ostensibly another Richler fiction about making movies in London — the protagonist, Jake Hersh, is a Canadian director living in the English capital — the novel was distinct. Longer than anything he had written before, as well as more elaborately constructed, St. Urbain’s Horseman introduced the stylistic signature of the author’s major period: contrapuntal storytelling, the present and past in exchange. Hersh’s upbringing in Montreal’s old Jewish neighbourhood, his emergence from a New World shtetl of family and faith, along with his misspent youth as an aspiring artist and lover, vie for space with the details of his present life, including the crisis that forms the dramatic spine — his trial at the Old Bailey courthouse in London on sex-crime charges.
The texture of the book was no less revelatory. Richler’s prose, always funny and smart, had deepened. Better, it had widened out to embrace volatile and often conflicting moods. Curiously, Jake Hersh’s obsession with his cousin Joey, the “Horseman” of the title — a shadowy figure who he is convinced is fighting Nazis and serving as a Golem-like protector of Jews — isn’t the source of the novel’s often unsettling energy. As with any satirist — a moralist by definition — the source is human society and the human animal itself, a creature of inherent contradictions, many unsightly. Scatology, bodily dysfunction, the remorseless imperatives of sex and ambition, the ugly strut of the male on the make, are as intrinsic to the prose as verbs and nouns.
St. Urbain’s Horseman would be a challenge to put on screen, despite the fact that the book included excerpts from a jokey script featuring a dominatrix Mary Poppins flogging General “Monty” Montgomery and that the plot hinges on a scoundrel posing as a director who “screen-tests” a German nanny on the proverbial casting couch. A critical and commercial hit that received a Booker Prize nomination in England and a Governor General’s Award in Canada, the novel immediately attracted producers. Alan J. Pakula, whose film Klute was about to win an Academy Award, purchased the option, and Richler agreed to do the script.
Two years and a dozen drafts later, however, the project stalled. Richler, meanwhile, had at last caught a cinematic break when the financing came together for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. He rewrote an existing script for Kotcheff, who would direct. A twenty-six-year-old American actor named Richard Dreyfus was cast as Duddy, and a crew started shooting in the same Montreal streets where the author was born and raised. Film crews would haunt the neighbourhood again in the upcoming decade, thanks to versions of Richler’s Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang and Joshua Then and Now, directed once more by Ted Kotcheff from a script by the author. The relative ease of getting Joshua made in 1984 was the result, in part, of wonky Hollywood-style logic: Kotcheff had lately directed a hit film called Rambo: First Blood, starring Sylvester Stallone.
But for St. Urbain’s Horseman there would be no such luck. It wasn’t until January 2001, six months before his death at the age of seventy, that Mordecai Richler learned that his lawyer and friend Michael Levine had re-optioned the novel to a Canadian producer, thirty years after its publication.
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