It stars Richard Dreyfuss as the title character, a brash young Jewish Montrealer who embarks on a string of get-rich-quick schemes in a bid to gain respect.

The cast also features Micheline Lanctôt, Randy Quaid, Joseph Wiseman, Denholm Elliott, Joe Silver and Jack Warden.

Irwin gets his girlfriend Linda, the daughter of the hotel's owner, to persuade Duddy to stage a clandestine roulette game.

Dingleman invites him to discuss his scheme on a train to New York but just wants a drug mule to unknowingly take the risk of smuggling heroin.

On the train, Duddy meets Virgil and offers to buy his pinball machines, which are illegal in the United States.

In the final scene, Duddy has risen far enough that he can run a tab at the local diner, and his father boasts about how his son made it.

Lionel Chetwynd was commissioned by John G. Kemeny to write a script based on Mordecai Richler's novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

In 1961, he had directed a television play for ITV's Armchair Theatre based on Kravitz, with Hugh Futcher in the title role.

[citation needed] American producer Samuel Z. Arkoff was approached to make the film, but wanted to turn Duddy into a Greek character.

[8] The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz premiered at the Place des Arts on 11 April 1974, and was theatrically released the next day.

[12] In the period between shooting Duddy Kravitz and actually seeing the completed movie, Richard Dreyfuss was offered, and twice turned down, the role of Matt Hooper in Jaws;[13] having read the script he decided that it was a film he would "rather watch than be in".

Discovering that the role of Hooper had still not been cast, he jumped at it to ensure that he was safely under contract to make another movie before anybody at Universal Pictures heard any negative press about Kravitz.