Caddyshack (1980)

Directed by Harold Ramis. Starring Michael O’Keefe, Chevy Chase, Ted Knight, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, Sarah Holcomb, Cindy Morgan, Scott Colomby, Henry Wilcoxon, Dan Resin, John F. Barmon Jr., Brian Doyle-Murray. [R]

Classic slobs-vs.-snobs comedy in the Animal House tradition—no surprise, seeing as how they share two of the same writers (Harold Ramis and Douglas Kenney)—set at a posh, exclusive country club. Headlined by four prime comic performers, but what little story there is belongs to O’Keefe as a kid working as a golf caddie to earn enough money to go to college. It’s hard to decide if the film would have improved by sidelining the O’Keefe material (including an unnecessary pregnancy scare detour) to make more room for knee-slapping “shenanigans,” or maybe it would have been better if more disciplined filmmakers had found the jokes within the context of the caddie quest instead of throwing in so many distractions without any payoff beyond the immediate punchline. Nevertheless, shapeless and disorganized as it may be, the performers generate lots of laughs—Chase plays to his strengths as a detached and supercilious wiseacre, Murray is aggressively weird as a dopey groundskeeping bum with “Cinderella story” fantasies and a long-running rivalry with a pesky gopher, Dangerfield makes a handful of appearances basically doing stand-up routines (almost all of them hysterical), and Knight—the most unsung of the quartet because he’s the snooty, arrogant “enemy”—delivers some of the stealthiest winners the movie has to offer (“I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber…didn’t wanna do it, but felt I owed it to them”), and actually comes close to a real performance while he’s at it! (Sadly, he never made another movie, dying a few years later from colon cancer.) Ramis’ directorial debut. A much-derided sequel was released in 1988.

78/100