Viking Night: Caddyshack
By Bruce Hall
January 17, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The hesitancy you hear is my own fault. And as I write this, I have to admit that’s got me feeling a little down. Caddyshack is, after all, considered by many to be one of the greatest comedies of all time. I can’t really disagree with that, but I say so with the following reservations.
Prior to now, I have not seen it in at least 15 years.
It's taken me what, two years to write about it?
From a critical point of view, I don't like it nearly as much as I used to.
Of course it's a free country (even if it doesn't always feel that way), and there's no law that says you have to love Caddyshack (even though it does feel that way). After this is published, I'll probably find it hard to get work, and people will stare at me from under suspicious brows and whisper after me in hushed tones as I pass by. It's not that I don't like Caddyshack; if you're a fan of movies or comedy in general, it is a must own. And unless you're the political prisoner of a totalitarian government who's had your sense of humor surgically removed, it's hard not to find enough laughs to make it worth your while. It's just that when I sat down to watch it this time, there was something...missing.
The question is whether it's me, or is it the movie?
It's probably me, because despite its reputation a comedy, Caddyshack is first and foremost two parallel tales of adversity. It is the story of Danny Noonan (Michael O'Keefe, the only cast member who can actually swing a golf club worth a damn), a young caddie at the illustrious Bushwood Country Club who dreams of attending college, but cannot afford tuition. He caddies for Ty Webb (Chevy Chase, playing himself), a wealthy playboy who spends his days trolling the grounds for women and making impossible trick shots while blindfolded. The irony here is that even as Ty dispenses dubious life lessons and innovative golf tips, he seems to have much less to offer the world than the guy who carries his clubs.
If there had been an Occupy Bushwood movement, they'd have been all over this guy.
Our second tale of woe is that of Carl Spackler (Bill Murray), Bushwood's assistant groundskeeper. Carl is a gritty, hard working, salt of the earth kind of guy. He is also a dangerously unstable, misogynistic drug fiend who harbors delusions of world travel and high intellectual pursuit. Carl has been tasked with eliminating a precocious animatronic gopher from Bushwood's golf course - by any means necessary. It's a bad idea to use phrases like that with Carl, as the extravagant population of Bushwood will soon come to realize. Danny and Carl would seem to be from very different worlds, but they are both truly part of the Ninety-Nine Percent, and when their paths eventually cross two men of simple means will be changed forever as the hand of destiny executes it's unfathomable machinations upon them.
Okay, I may be overstating things a little. Just stay with me. That's all I ask.
Danny gets his shot at college when he becomes caddy for Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight), a powerful man who is co-founder of Bushwood. Smails holds the purse strings to a prestigious caddy scholarship and thanks to a little hard work and a lot of ass kissing, Danny finds himself the front runner. All he has to do is stay in Smails' favor and keep his hands off the Good Judge's niece, the incredibly sexy and aptly named Lacy Underall (Cindy Morgan, looking a hell of a lot better than she did in Tron). Lacy is something or a cross between Phoebe Cates from Fast Times and Michelle Pfeiffer from Scarface. The character's only purpose is to...well, you know why she's there.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Bushwood's gopher problem is the direct result of the Czervik Construction Company's nearby activity. And the owner, Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield, also playing himself) is an obnoxious, slovenly self made millionaire who has been hanging around the club throwing his money (and his mouth) around - much to the chagrin of Smails. Eighteen holes aren't quite enough space for two men and their egos, so they agree to a mano a mano golf-off to the tune of $20,000.
It's hard to throw a guy out of your country club when he's got more money than you do and you both happen to suck at golf. Smails begins to assemble a crack team of golfing Terminators, forcing Danny and Ty to take sides. Will they join the snobs, or will they join the slobs? Danny's future education is at stake, and while Ty does seem to be impossibly rich, he also seems as comfortable with Czervik and his Technicolor wardrobe as he does with people who have a Porsche for every day of the week. At the same time, Carl seems to have met his match with the gopher, and his private little war provides the movie with a slowly escalating backdrop of glorious wanton violence.
And that, in a nutshell, would be your story.
Or, it would be if Caddyshack were not also a freewheeling, occasionally frustrating mash up of tenuously related subplots, lovably eccentric minor characters (Doctor Beeper = Priceless) and sophomoric hijinks. It more or less works out, but only in the purely abstract way that things do for a guy like Ty Webb. It's easy to be smug and self assured when you're independently wealthy and there's nobody around to say you can't spend all day on the golf course sucking down highballs and chasing women. Or to put it another way, life is good when you're the offspring of Harold Ramis and you've got Bill Murray, Chevy Chase and Rodney Dangerfield - all masters of comic improvisation and all at the height of their abilities - in your corner.
Must be nice.
And it is, when it works, which is...most of the time. The majority of dialogue spoken on film by Murray, Chase and Dangerfield was improvised on the fly and while it is generally funny, it does show. And it's particularly noticeable on successive viewings, or if you happen to have a practiced eye. You see, in much the way Happy Days was originally about Richie Cunningham before Arthur Fonzarelli took over, Caddyshack was originally a different movie until three guys in particular proved to be ad-lib comedy gold. But where the Fonz is literally what caused Happy Days to jump the shark, I think the change in focus worked out for the best with Caddyshack. However the downside is that the movie has a choppy, uneven feel that often makes it seem more like a series of strung together sight gags and lazy puns than an actual film. It's a considerable trade off, albeit a worthwhile one, for the most part.
I suppose the bottom line is that as a director, how often does something like that happen to you? It's like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, or the "pistol" scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or De Niro talking to the mirror in Taxi Driver. Sure it wasn't in the script, but how can you not leave that in the film? I don't care if you're filming Sophie's Choice - if something incredible happens, sometimes you've got to work it in. If a leprechaun with a lightsaber parachutes into the middle of the scene, you work it in. If a flaming unicorn rides through the take, you work it in. If Bill Murray says something so spontaneously hilarious that you know it'll never come out of his mouth again....
WORK. IT. IN.
And if it changes the structure of the movie, then so be it! Caddyshack is a very flawed film but it's those very flaws that make it so memorable. It comes at considerable cost, but if you ask most people who have seen it, and if you ask anyone who has seen the sequel, the cost was worth it. Look at it this way - if you spend a lot of time critiquing and analyzing film, you find over time that you pick up on things that would take most people four or five viewings to notice. You feel the need to point them out because they're valid observations, but they are observations that just aren't going to be of any concern to the average moviegoer. This is why romantic comedies are so popular. This is why Michael Bay is so successful.
And you know what? That's okay. Caddyshack could have used a lot more polish, and Harold Ramis would be the first person to agree with that. But despite its many imperfections, they are by and large glorious ones. And while they bother me more than they did the first time I saw it, they didn't bother me enough to keep me from owning Caddyshack on Blu-Ray. I can only assume that for this, I will someday achieve - on my deathbed - Total Consciousness.
So I've got that going for me, which is nice.