Caddyshack

• Directed by Harold Ramis
• July 25, 1980

While a groundskeeper at a country club tries to kill an elusive gopher, a young caddie tries to get a scholarship from a snobby judge who cofounded that club.

Some have called Caddyshack the funniest sports movie ever made, and they are probably right. I myself cannot call it sidesplitting funny. It is more chuckle funny and consistently entertaining with jokes and general weirdness coming steady throughout.

One thing that’s clear from the start is that a great deal of this movie was left on the cutting room floor. It certainly looks like that to me. Drug use was reportedly rampant on the set but that does not explain every leap of narrative or quick resolution in the story. Harold Ramis was no slob of a director. There are elements here that are just introduced and then resolved within minutes. The pregnancy scare for starters. I think that lasted no more than five minutes in the entire movie.

Much like National Lampoon’s Animal House this is a bunch of desperate elements floating about. Unlike that film things connect better from start to finish. There are several stories going on here which all come to a head in the finale in a disturbingly logical way. If you watch the opening 10 minutes and the closing 10 or 15 minutes you would not see the connection, but by watching the whole story you see how each thing started moving together.

We have talented performers like Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Bill Murray, and Brian Doyle-Murray along with Michael O’Keefe, Sarah Holcomb, and Cindy Morgan. Cindy Morgan as Lacey Underall (that joke went past me far too many times) had the perfect look and attitude as the judge’s niece. Ted Knight was great as her uncle the stuck-up Judge Elihu Smails, but Rodney Dangerfield as nouveau riche golfer and Smails’s nemesis Al Czervik is clearly in his element. It was perfect Dangerfield.

I earlier mentioned elements left on the cutting room floor. Maybe I missed it or it was indeed left on the cutting room floor but Al Czervik just shows up on the scene. He is less a character and more a plot element. Dangerfield’s character is building condos next to the course but that does not mean he must join Bushwood.

But that’s not the only story going on. A young caddie named Danny Noonan (Michael O’Keefe) is trying to get a caddie scholarship and is dating Maggie O’Hooligan (Sarah Holcomb) and she is the one with the brief pregnancy scare. Danny is also the caddie to Smails.

Chevy Chase is Ty Webb and is the charming asshole who gets toyed with by Lacey Underall who also toys with Danny whose girlfriend is cool with it. Really? Lacey is either in her late teens or early 20s and at least in one instance a crime occurred but let’s not think about that.

And let’s not forget Bill Murray as groundskeeper Carl Spackler who is tasked by his boss Sandy McFiddish (Thomas A. Carlin) who could be the inspiration for groundskeeper Willie in The Simpsons to kill a gopher that is wrecking the golf course. Spackler is quite a few fries short of a happy meal and off on his own separate reality. That could be because Murray did a great deal of improv with his lines since this initially small part kept growing and he kept getting called back for more filming.

That’s a lot of different balls to be juggling. And yet with all the stuff not presented there is still enough there that you get through the movie with any questions arising only if you think about things. Every element that gets you to the end connects and makes sense.

No matter how stupid things get the light dialogue is well done. It’s not dumb funny but intelligent funny. They knew the difference and that is important in comedy. Maybe that is why the movie has such a strong following and so many find it so quotable. And even the improvised stuff by Murray is great as it was done by a master at the top of his game.

There’s no deep message to be found in Caddyshack. It uses class warfare as a basis for the whole story which has been done tons since. The narrative is all exaggeration and weirdness. From the iconic gopher to Spackler’s use of explosives to kill that gopher, this borders on being a cartoon. The music is fantastic and just that opening song has become iconic. And I don’t use that word lightly as many others do these days.

There is some raunch in this, but it is not heavy. The nudity and inappropriate behavior is not the main selling point of the movie. I’m not sure if it’s a bonus but it’s something extra in the film. Others have tried to copy this film and with a shallow perspective have focused on the nudity and behavior of the characters rather than understand that despite its flaws, it was a well-done story.

Caddyshack is a movie I can see some turning up their nose at, but nobody really should. It’s one of those movies everybody should watch at least once. It’s entertaining and a cultural touchstone.