Caddyshack Made $39.8 Million. It's Still Three Comedians Avoiding a Golf Movie
Rodney Dangerfield is great in it and so is Bill Murray, for his six days. The director himself said he could barely watch the rest.
By the Heckle Desk · · 3 min read
Caddyshack opened on July 25, 1980, in 656 theaters. It cost somewhere between $4.8 million and $6 million, made about $39.8 million at home and finished 17th for the year. The American Film Institute ranked it 71st on its list of the funniest American movies in 2000, and put Carl Spackler's Cinderella story speech 92nd among the great movie quotes. Every man over 50 in this country can do that speech, and will, at the first sign of a putter. There's no law against it, though I've seen a good deal of grassroots support for one.
I'll give the picture what it's owed, and it's owed plenty. Rodney Dangerfield, then known mainly as a stand-up, is about as funny as anybody has ever been while wearing those clothes. Bill Murray was on set for only six days and improvised much of his dialogue, and I've had head colds that lasted longer and contributed less. Take those two out and put them on a stage, and I'd pay to see it. That is, in fact, what's wrong with the movie, because that is what the movie does. It puts them on a stage. Dangerfield isn't in the story so much as he's visiting it, the way a rich uncle visits a hospital.
The trouble is everything else. There's a plot in here, about a caddie named Danny Noonan trying to get a college scholarship out of a judge, and I'd invite you to ask any man who loves this film how that comes out. Watch his face. It's the look of someone asked to name the vice president under Taft. Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars and found it written rather loosely, which is the politest thing anybody has said about a screenplay that got this far on cocaine. Metacritic has it at 48. Rotten Tomatoes says 73, so it has its defenders, but then so did Prohibition. Harold Ramis, who directed it, later complained about the golf swings of nearly the whole cast, sparing only Michael O'Keefe. So this is a golf movie whose own director thinks only one man in it can play golf.
It wasn't a secret on the set. The actor Peter Berkrot called cocaine "the fuel that kept the film running," and I believe him, since you can see exactly where the fuel ran out. Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, the two biggest names in the picture, had no scene together until Ramis noticed that fact and added one. That's the sort of thing you only notice in a movie nobody's been steering. Ramis, making his debut, said afterward that he could "barely watch it." I'd take his word on that. He was there, and he's the one who had to live with the gopher.
Ah, the gopher. It's a hydraulic puppet from John Dykstra's effects company, with moving ears, and it was operated by Pat Brymer, who didn't get a credit. So the only character in the film with a clear motive and a sustained arc was a puppet, and the man working it didn't make the credits. Critics have since reappraised the whole thing into a classic, which is what happens to any comedy once the people who saw it at 15 start running the magazines.
The best evidence comes from Denmark. The Danish distributor cut 20 minutes to build up Murray's part, and Denmark was the only country outside the United States where the picture initially did well. In all the years people have been quoting this film, only the Danes ever gave it a note, and they were right. A man's favorite comedy is like his high school football team: it gets better every year after it stops playing.