Ramis: Caddyshack (1980)

By all accounts, Caddyshack went through so many edits, rewrites and revisions that the end product was totally unrecognisable from what Harold Ramis started out with – and it shows. In fact, it’s hard to think of a more anarchic, chaotic, incoherent 80s comedy – at least a mainstream comedy – as we’re taken through a series of running jokes that are never given space or time to run, characters and character traits that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly, and a truly bewildering array of comic styles and signatures that never settle into a unified atmosphere or ambience. Nominally, it’s about the rivalry between two golf caddies – Danny Noonan (Michael O’Keefe) and Tony D’Annunzio (Scott Colombo) – over a summer at Bushwood Country Club, but we’re quickly distracted by supporting roles from Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray, as well as a mechanised gopher who was turned into something of a main character after all the footage was completed. For a film that was an inch less committed to its inanity, that would spell disaster, but the incoherence actually works perfectly here, plunging us into an anarchic flux that, like so many of the comedies released around this time, makes you feel part of the sheer fun of making it, with many of the scenes feeling like out-takes or as if they’ve been improvised on the spot, while the reactions of actors to other actors often feels as spontaneous and unscripted as in a live performance, especially when they’re not the ostensible focus of the scene. At the same time, the sheer incoherence means that every character is, inevitably, somewhat oneiric, which is perhaps why Chase, Dangerfield and Murray were elevated from cameo to central roles, since their performances all pretty much play as solo acts, or one-man SNL sketches, which can make it pretty disorienting when they have to pretend to talk or communicate with other people, let alone each other, but also poetically appropriate for the first and last scene between Chase and Murray committed to film following their falling-out – and tentative rapprochement – in the wake of Chase’s game-changing departure from SNL in the late 70s. And in many ways the film is about reframing Chase as a film actor, just as his character – an upper-class golfer – syncs most naturally with both this oneiric style and his own comic signature, as he wanders around the golf course with the idiotic, meditative calm that he did so well, speaking more or less on autopilot and often surprising himself – but only a little – with the last thing that’s come out of his mouth. Somewhere between a Zen audioguide for golfers and a somnambulist golf commentator, his platitudinous inanities nail the peculiar oblivion of the film more than even Murray and Dangerfield’s deranged monologues, not least because they’re more creepily post-oneiric, suffused with a slimy, sticky, stifling calm that always makes it feel as if he’s just masturbated, or that every pleasure is somewhat masturbatory, even or especially when it involves him communing or copulating with another person. That sense of an ever so slightly or recently ruffled reassurance was the role Chase would make his own with the National Lampoon films and beyond, but it’s even more self-effacing and minor in this formative moment, which also prevents Chase graduating into a lead character, as much as some of the opening scenes might seem to set him up that way. Like every other actor or bit player, he’s subsumed back into the crazy, inane rhythm of the golf course itself, so hyperbolic and incoherent that it often feels as if the film is as much about the inanity of golf as a spectator sport as anything else, driven above all by a will to reimagine golf as the most idiotic, kinetic, visceral spectator sport possible. And in that sense, Ramis succeeds – televised or cinematic golf has never been as fun before or since – and perhaps could only succeed by failing to rein in the superabundance and incoherence of comic spectacle on display here, still contagious some thirty years later.