Alive and Kicking

Throughout February 1978, many Quebeckers changed their plans for Wednesday nights. Strikers at the newspaper Montréal-Matin moved a union meeting. A university hist­ory class persuaded its professor to reschedule a lecture. They all wanted to watch a seven-part television mini-series. Even the premier’s office organized a special screening of the second episode for reporters who had been obliged to cover a first ministers’ conference.

The show that so transfixed the province that month was Duplessis, a dramatization of the career of Maurice Duplessis. Directed by Mark Blandford and written by Denys Arcand, it was broadcast almost twenty years after the premier died in office, at the age of sixty-nine. Arcand wrote, and the actor Jean Lapointe personified, a detailed portrait of a highly complex figure: a politician who revealed corruption and then profited from it, who was kind and brutal, loyal and unscrupulous, sentimental and ruthless, and always...