Movie Report: Caddyshack (1980)

In lieu of picking up one of the many score of films I’ve accumulated and that rest inside my unwatched cabinet or atop the video game cabinet, I recently sat down and rewatched this DVD which I’d seen before. Perhaps it was because Facebook had been showing me posts about the film as it was released in July, so every page that promotes itself on Facebook dealing with movies had to remind its followers of it and Facebook taints my feed with nonsense. Or is it? Clearly, it influenced my viewing habits here, although I did not choose to follow any Facebook pages, and I rewatched a DVD I already owned. So commercially speaking, it was a worthless for Facebook. Unless it has some other sort of agenda….

At any rate, where was I? Oh, yes, Caddyshack. I was too young to see it in the theaters, and by the time we had cable, the film had rotated off of it. So I did not see it for the first time until the film was over a decade old or more. I’ve watched it within the last decade since I have the DVD of it, but I don’t appear to have shared my thoughts on it, so here I will.

It’s a common theme: The stuffy well-to-do versus the working class. In this case, Danny is the oldest of a large family, and he works at the country club as a caddy (obv). A new member, played by Rodney Dangersfield, represents the noveau riche, in this case a local condo developer who is crude and upsets the swells lead by Ted Knight. Danny needs a college scholarship that Knight’s Judge Smails controls, so he has to suck up to the judge whose niece, played by Cindy Morgan, has come to stay with him, and she’s a looker and very, erm, worldly and tempting. Chevy Chase plays a Zennish golfer, and Bill Murray plays Carl, the groundskeeper tasked with eliminating the gophers. I mean, the film is so iconic that I don’t have to explain it to you, gentle reader. After all, you’re old enough to be reading a blog, so you’re of a certain age. One who can quote the movie, and you’ve got that going for you, which is nice.

One thing that this film does not do, and some others have, is change whom you’re rooting for as you get older. The Smailsians are so over-the-top snobs that you don’t end up rooting for them against the kids like in some movies. It’s a story of the underdogs and Rodney Dangerfield against the bluebloods, and that’s the story of America. Well, competent underdogs against the bluebloods. Which is not necessarily the story of current America.

But enough of that. The real question would be: Maggie O’Hooligan or Lacey Underall?

Sarah Holcomb played Maggie O’Hooligan, who ran the snack bar, and who was Danny’s girl, sort of–one of the subplots is whether he got her pregnant.

Cindy Morgan played Lacey Underall, Judge Smails’ niece, who dallied both with Chevy Chase’s character and with Danny, so she was a bit more of an upper-class archetype of the, what, promiscuous rebel?

I would take the working girl in a heartbeat.

Holcomb played only in a couple of films around the turn of the 1980s, but Morgan has had roles from then until now, but only sporadically.