Tonight, at 8pm, the CBC will air the first part of a new miniseries based on Mordecai Richler’s 1971 novel, St. Urbain’s Horseman.
“The story is simple enough: Montrealer Jake Hersh is a filmmaker living in London, happily married to a woman much too good for him, when he’s put on trial for a crime he didn’t commit,” wrote author and Richler obsessive Joel Yanofsky in Sunday’s Gazette. “But it’s those he has committed — failing to measure up as a husband, an artist, a Jew, a man — that haunt him. The novel’s achievement is that it’s outrageously funny at the same time as it’s deadly serious.”
St. Urbain’s Horseman, although it is set largely in 1970s London and Montreal, is an even greater and more mature evocation of the Jewish neighbourhood of Richler’s youth in the 1940s. Its portrayal of the inner lives and preoccupations of Jewish Montrealers ranks it as a seminal work of Montreal literature. But what about the miniseries? Brendan Kelly gave his take in yesterday’s Gazette:
This book is, indeed, a tough nut to crack, and the folks who made the new mini-series only get it partly right. Joe Wiesenfeld, the third and final writer to work on its screenplay, has taken the sprawling, time-travelling novel and turned it into a much straighter, chronologically told story. And maybe that had to be done. But in the process, it makes St. Urbain’s Horseman a less captivating tale, which perhaps was inevitable.
One great thing about Richler’s prose is his caustic wit, and that’s not the easiest thing to capture on the big or small screen. There is some of that on display here, and former Montrealer David Julian Hirsh does a good job of portraying the edgy, wisecracking Jake Hersh, who delivers the snappiest lines (most of them classic Richler-esque putdowns).
The mini-series opens with Jake returning from Montreal to his London home, following his father’s funeral, to find a woman in lingerie on his sofa and the human cockroach that is Harry Stein (Michael Riley) wandering around in Day-Glo boxers. This is the incident that will lead to Jake being falsely accused of assaulting the underage au pair from Germany.
But the drama then quickly zips back to St. Urbain St. circa 1952 and begins recounting the saga in chronological fashion. The filmmakers actually shot on Garnier St. rather than St. Urbain because it was easier logistically, and Garnier — which is much farther east in the Plateau, near Papineau Ave. — does just fine standing in for St. Urbain.
It’s a shame that the miniseries’ producers weren’t able to film on St. Urbain Street itself but, to be fair, today’s street bears little resemblance to the one described in Richler’s novels. In fact, by the time that Richler returned to Montreal from London, in the 1960s, he found that the St. Urbain of his youth had become an altogether different neighbourhood. “To come home in 1968 was to discover that it wasn’t there — it had been bulldozed away — or had become, as is the case with St. Urbain, a Greek preserve,” he wrote in The Street.
Even then, though, enough of the old St. Urbain had lingered through to the 1970s that the opening scene of the 1974 film The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz remains the best cinematic evocation of the Main’s Jewish ghetto. St. Urbain’s Horseman won’t live up to that — but I’ll still check it out tonight anyway.