Caddyshack

Caddyshack, American comedy film about golf that is regarded as one of the funniest sports movies of all time. The amusing performances by its cast, including Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, and Bill Murray, and its oft-quoted one-liners make it a pop-culture icon in the genre. Caddyshack was directed by Harold Ramis and released in 1980. The film’s depictions of a private country club’s well-to-do members and its employees (caddies and grounds crew) poke fun at various stereotypes while farcically sending up the fraught relations among elite country club members, outsider applicants, and lower-rung workers.

Plot

The movie’s plot revolves around the antics of the eccentric members of the prestigious, private Bushwood Country Club and its employees, specifically caddie Danny Noonan (played by Michael O’Keefe). Noonan, a down-on-his-luck teenager working to earn money for college, often caddies for the suave, New Age, advice-giving, avid golfer Ty Webb (Chevy Chase), the son of one of the club’s cofounders. Noonan offers to caddie for Judge Elihu Smails in an effort to gain favor. Smails (Ted Knight) is the club’s elitist cofounder and director of the caddie scholarship program. Meanwhile, both Noonan and Webb romantically pursue Smails’s niece Lacey Underall (Cindy Morgan).

Injecting himself into this mix is the obnoxious real estate developer Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield), who goes to extremes to gain acceptance into the club but behaves in ways that are seen as gauche and flashy for the genteel and reserved club members. His character spoofs the conflict between historically white Christian country club members and their fears about nouveau-riche immigrants and minorities trying to join. For instance, while entering the club with an East Asian companion, Czervik quips, “I hear this place is restricted, Wang, so don’t tell ’em you’re Jewish, okay?”

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Buffoonish assistant groundskeeper Carl Spackler (Bill Murray) adds even more comic value. He tells improbable stories about, for example, caddying for the Dalai Lama and imagining his own Cinderella story as a successful professional golfer. In one scene, Spackler caddies for Bishop Fred Pickering (Henry Wilcoxon) through a massive thunderstorm; as he completes an impressive round for the ages (with background music by Elmer Bernstein from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments[1956]), the Bishop misses his final putt, shouts at the sky, and is struck by lightning. Throughout the movie Spackler hunts a rampageous and destructive gopher and tries unsuccessfully to kill it by variously bizarre means.

After numerous comedic hijinks and misadventures, the movie’s climax occurs during a team golf match pitting Smails and Dr. Beeper (Dan Resin) against Webb and Czervik. Despite club rules prohibiting bets, the sides make wagers on the game that eventually reach $160,000 on the final putt. Czervik plays terribly and feigns an injury, after which the caddie Noonan steps in as his replacement. On the green at the final hole, Noonan’s putt will determine who wins. His ball stops just short of the hole and rests on the lip of the cup. At that moment Spackler detonates a string of plastic explosives he has rigged around the golf course in another attempt to kill the gopher. The comically massive explosions knock Noonan’s ball into the hole and give Noonan, Webb, and Czervik the win over the country club establishment. The gopher, however, survives and dances to the Kenny Loggins song “I’m Alright” as the ending credits roll.

Production

Caddyshack was Ramis’s directorial debut; he wrote it with Douglas Kenney and Brian Doyle-Murray (Bill Murray’s brother). Some parts of the script are based on the Murray brothers’ experiences as children caddying at the Indian Hill Country Club in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. Ramis would go on to direct such classic comedies as Groundhog Day (1993; also with Bill Murray, although starring a groundhog instead of a gopher) and Analyze This (1999) and cowrite (with Dan Aykroyd) and act in Ghostbusters (1984). Caddyshack followed on the trend of National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), which Ramis and Kenney wrote with Chris Miller, shifting the comedic madness from a college fraternity row to a supposedly respectable country club.

Caddyshack was filmed primarily at Rolling Hills Country Club (now Grande Oaks Golf Club) in Davie, Florida. Later reports revealed that the set was a massive party with extensive cocaine use. The initial script was discarded the first week, and the original cut of more than four hours of film took a tremendous effort to edit, during which executive producer Jon Peters suggested using the gopher to tie the plot together.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Reception and legacy

When it was released in 1980, the R-rated movie (for vulgar language, brief nudity, and a sex scene) broke ground in the realm of crude humor, with the majority of its jokes slapstick or scatological. In a 1980 review in The Hollywood Reporter, Arthur Knight dubbed its rating “R as in raunchy.”

The film was not critically well received. Reviewers often noted its weak and hole-riddled plot and, per movie critic Roger Ebert’s review, inconsistent comic tone. Reviews also observed that most of the better comedic moments are delivered by Dangerfield, who, before the movie, was mostly known as a stand-up comedian, not a comedic actor. Despite the lukewarm reviews, Caddyshack became a viewer favorite for its memorable lines, slapstick humor, and reflection of enduring golf and country club stereotypes. A sequel, Caddyshack II (1988), stars Dangerfield’s fellow Borscht Belt comedian Jackie Mason, who, after his application to become a club member is rejected, buys the club and turns it into an amusement park. The sequel was similarly panned.

In 2018 journalist Chris Nashawaty published a book about the making of the movie, Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story. The book is highly rated by readers; The Washington Post described it as “much more fun to read than the movie was to watch.”