1980 Week: Caddyshack

          I’ve never quite understood why Caddyshack is so beloved, even though it features an unusual confluence of comedy actors—notably two generations of Saturday Night Live stars, Bill Murray and his predecessor Chevy Chase—and even though the movie fits into an appealing slobs-vs.-establishment continuum that stretches from Animal House (1978) to Ghostbusters (1984) and beyond. Maybe it’s my disinterest in sports, and maybe it’s my disinterest in stupidity, but the magic of Caddyshack escapes me. That said, it’s fascinating to observe how many different levels of comedy the film contains.

          The main plot, about a working-class caddy who endures rotten treatment from obnoxious country-club members until turning the tables on his oppressors, is satisfying in an obvious sort of way. A secondary thread, about the mano-a-mano competition between nouveau-riche vulgarian Al Czervik (Rodney Dangerfield) and old-money creep Judge Elihu Smails (Ted Knight), is performed in broad strokes by traditional comedy pros who make no pretense to real acting. Intermingled between these elements are scenes featuring the SNL guys, and that’s where Caddyshack really springs to life. Chase, who has top billing even though he plays a supporting role, is leading-man handsome as he performs at the apex of his charming-smartass skills, so watching him effortlessly render one-liners and sight gags is a kick. Chase only shows up every 20 minutes or so, but he crushes every time. Concurrently, Murray plays his scenes in virtual isolation, rendering a batshit-crazy characterization as a demented groundskeeper waging ultraviolent war against the pesky gopher who’s digging holes in the golf course where most of the movie’s action takes place.

          The irony is that none of these name-brand comedians is the movie’s protagonist. That honor falls to young Michael O’Keefe, so impressive in The Great Santini (1979) and so outgunned by his costars here.

          Cowritten and directed by frequent Murray collaborator Harold Ramis—who cowrote Meatballs (1979) and Ghostbusters, then cowrote and directed Groundhog Day (1993)—Caddyshack employs a scattershot approach to jokes. Some of the lowbrow stuff is embarrassing, such as the gag about a candy bar floating in a pool causing a panic among swimmers who mistake the thing for excrement. And some of the throwaway stuff is great, like the bits with a sleazy caddy supervisor played by Brian Doyle Murray, Bill’s brother and also one of the film’s screenwriters. However, the gulf between Dangerfield’s overbearing joke-a-minute attack and Murray’s sly shaping of a complete mythos is massive. And maybe that’s why fans dig Caddyshack—it’s got something for everyone, except for discriminating filmgoers. As a sidenote, Caddyshack introduced the theme-song artistry of soft-rock star Kenny Loggins, who later created tunes for Footloose (1985) and Top Gun (1986). Oh, and Chase was alone among the stars of the original film to reprise his role in the commercial and critical failure Caddyshack II (1988).

Caddyshack: FUNKY

1980 Week: Where the Buffalo Roam

          Even at the very beginning of his film career, Bill Murray made it clear he intended to be more than just a funnyman. After essentially transposing his wiseass Saturday Night Live persona into the lowbrow Canadian comedy Meatballs (1979), Murray gave himself a proper acting challenge in his next picture, Where the Buffalo Roam, a pseudo-biopic about notorious Rolling Stone political correspondent Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. By all accounts, Murray nailed his characterization, and even the hard-to-please Thomas was enamored of Murray’s performance. Unfortunately, the movie that producer-director Art Linson built around his leading actor is a mess. The first clue, of course, is that Murray gets second billing after Peter Boyle, because Where the Buffalo Roam is about the relationship between Thompson and wild-man attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta, whom the film fictionalizes as a character named Carl Lazlo (played by Boyle). While Boyle was a veteran film actor with a small measure of box-office power, Lazlo is subordinate in terms of narrative importance and screen time to Thompson.
          However, this is the least of the movie’s problems.

          Loosely adapting two Thompson articles, screenwriter John Kaye presents a jumbled story about Thompson trying to write a memorial article about Lazlo, who has disappeared in South America and is presumed dead. This occasions flashbacks to the duo’s peculiar experiences over the years. Thompson first meets Lazlo while the lawyer defends a bunch of counterculture kids facing drug charges, and later, Lazlo involves Thompson in a mad scheme to arm and finance South American rebels. Meanwhile, Thompson has unrelated escapades, including a bacchanalian hospital stay, a rambunctious college-lecture tour, and a scandalous tenure riding in the press plane accompanying a Nixon-like presidential candidate. Clearly, Kaye and Linson hoped to cram in every exciting story they’d ever heard about Thompson—a maniac known for his abuse of controlled substances and for his fearless challenges to those in power. Yet in trying to frame the movie around the episodic Lazlo/Thompson relationship, Linson dissipated any hope of narrative cohesion. Where the Buffalo Roam is a collection of sketches, and very few of them are actually funny.

          It’s hard to fault Murray, who commits wholeheartedly to his performance. He’s exactly as dangerous, indulgent, marble-mouthed, and reckless as Thompson was reputed to be in real life. Yet Murray’s performance is almost more dramatic in nature than comedic, partly because Thompson was self-destructive, and partly because Thompson was an unapologetic asshole. There’s a fine line between Murray’s default characterization—the smart aleck who winks at little tin gods—and Thompson’s scorched-earth approach to life. Additionally, Boyle isn’t funny at all as Lazlo, who comes across like a raving maniac instead of a visionary. Some moments in Where the Buffalo Roam work, particularly Thompson’s rabble-rousing lecture before an enthusiastic college crowd, but the overall “story” is shapeless and weird and unsatisfying.

Where the Buffalo Roam: FUNKY

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video (1979)

          As one of the architects of Saturday Night Live’s early years—he wrote the very first sketch broadcast on the show—Michael O’Donoghue occupies an important place in the history of counterculture comedy. His work was consistently deadpan, pitch-black, and satirical. It turns out, however, that O’Donoghue’s style loses its potency upon extended exposure. After working on SNL’s first three years, during which he occasionally performed as the onscreen character “Mr. Mike,” O’Donoghue got the go-ahead from NBC to produce a special that was supposed to air while SNL was on hiatus. Predictably, O’Donoughe generated something so acidic, deviant, and strange that NBC balked. Yet because O’Donoghue (and executive producer Lorne Michaels) enlisted famous members of the SNL family to appear in the project—titled Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video—a minor theatrical release was arranged in 1979, with the program’s brief running time padded by the addition of a short featuring SNL’s long-suffering Claymation character Mr. Bill.

          Seen in its currently available form, a 75-minute show with built-in commercial breaks, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video feels like what it is—an all-O’Donoghue episode of SNL, hosted by the project’s creator in his Mr. Mike persona and featuring a combination of fake ads, faux newsreels, running gags, short films, sketches, and weird interstitial bits. Everything in Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video is either deliberately gruesome or deliberately odd, but very little of the material is funny. (During his onscreen introduction, O’Donoghue promises “an odyssey of aggressive weirdness,” featuring “the cheap thrills, the shabby secrets . . . blue water/white death in search of Michael Rockefeller.”)

          Primarily shot on video, the picture charts its doomed course right from the first piece, an ersatz news report on a feline swimming school in Amsterdam; the piece culminates with an endless slo-mo montage of housecats getting thrown into a swimming pool. Soon afterward comes a long sketch starring Dan Aykroyd as a preacher in a church worshiping Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord. “We are all guilty in the eyes of Jack Lord,” Aykroyd exclaims. “Let him be your TV guide!” Beating the joke to death, in the grand SNL tradition, the sketch climaxes with a hula dancer performing a gospel song that features the lyric, “Were you there when they crucified Jack Lord?” And that, believe it or not, is probably the comic highlight of Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. Other random bits include “military test film” of the Laser Bra 2000, a vignette of Aykroyd showing off his real-life webbed toes, a quick scene of the Loch Ness monster being arrested for smuggling drugs, and a snippet of Sex Pistols guitarist Sid Vicious singing the Frank Sinatra classic “My Way”—with the soundtrack obscured while a text crawl explains that the producers couldn’t get the rights to the song. (The Vicious clip was appropriated from the Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, which reached U.S. screens a year later.)

          Aykroyd is the only SNL cast member to appear prominently, although Bill Murray is featured in a small running gang as a homeless man. Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner both pop up for one line each—alongside Carrie Fisher, Teri Garr, Deborah Harry, and others—during a sketch about women explaining their attraction to tacky men. (“When I reach down and feel a full colostomy bag,” actress Jill Davis coos, “I know I’m with a real man.”) There’s a certain demented integrity to Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, and the project’s strange history lends it a smidgen of forbidden-fruit allure. Nonetheless, this pop-culture oddity is far more interesting as a concept than it is as an actual experience.

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video: FREAKY

Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976)

          During his heyday, writer-director Paul Mazursky was so good at constructing incisive scenes filled with humor, insight, and pathos that it was frustrating whenever he got mired in self-indulgence. For example, Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village, a fictionalized account of his own transition from the provincial Jewish community in Brooklyn where he grew up to the bohemian wonderland of 1950s Greenwich Village, should be impossibly precious. After all, Mazursky includes characters based on his parents, dramatizes formative sexual experiences, and even re-creates the texture of early acting lessons. Executed without discipline and taste, Next Stop, Greenwich Village could have been nothing but a filmed diary entry. Yet Mazursky (mostly) applies the same rigorous techniques he employed when telling the stories of wholly fictional characters, so the movie is brisk, funny, lively, and surprising—except when it isn’t. And that’s where the issue of self-indulgence becomes relevant.

          After starting very strong, Next Stop, Greenwich Village gets stuck in a groove about halfway through its running time, because Mazursky includes such needless scenes as the lead character’s dream/nightmare of what it would be like to have his overbearing mother invade one of his acting classes. Furthermore, the exploration of crises that are experienced by the lead character’s downtown friends feels a bit forced. Were this the work of a lesser filmmaker, these problems would have been catastrophic. Yet since Next Stop, Greenwich Village represents Mazursky at his prime, they’re only minor flaws. The movie is so good, in the mean, that even sizable detours can’t subtract from the value of the journey.

          In terms of texture, Mazursky strikes a terrific balance between deglamorizing and romanticizing the New York City of his younger days. Scenes of cavorting through the streets with like-minded friends and of sharing a bed with a beautiful young girlfriend make the best moments of protagonist Larry Lipinksy’s life seem like pure postadolescent bliss, and rightfully so. Meanwhile, grim encounters with disappointment and heartbreak, to say nothing of incessant clashes with the aforementioned smothering mom, play out as epic suffering—which is often how young people perceive their own travails. In sum, Mazursky seems to get things exactly right whenever the movie clicks. He also, as always, benefits from extraordinary performances. An actor himself, Mazursky regularly drew the best possible work from his casts, creating a loose performance space in which players can easily blend their idiosyncracises with the rhythms of the text.

          Playing the Mazursky surrogate, leading man Lenny Baker is terrific, all gangly awekwardness mixed with youthful arrogance. Ellen Greene is sly and sexy as his quick-witted girlfriend, and Shelley Winters finds a perfect vessel for her uniquely voracious screen persona. Durable supporting players including Lou Jacobi, Mike Kellin, and Joe Spinell lend ample Noo Yawk flavor, while future stars Antonio Fargas, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Vincent Schiavelli, and Christopher Walken appear in secondary roles of various sizes. And if the movie ultimately lacks a satisfying resolution—since it’s really just a snapshot of a transitional moment—that’s inconsequential given how much sensitive entertainment the experience of watching the movie provides.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village: GROOVY

Meatballs (1979)

          Mostly notable as Bill Murray’s movie-star debut—and his first collaboration with director Ivan Reitman, of Stripes (1981) and Ghostbusters (1984) fame—the Canadian indie Meatballs is an amiably insouciant comedy. The picture depicts how the counselors and kids at a second-rate summer camp embrace their also-ran status throughout a summer filled with mischief, sex, and sticking it to their obnoxious counterparts at another camp. Although the premise suggests a lowbrow comedy filled with bathroom humor and panty raids, Meatballs is all bark and no bite, at least in terms of the usual teen-comedy tropes. Excepting a tame sequence of dudes eavesdropping on an all-girls cabin, the sex in the movie is discreet and romantic, and the biggest bathroom joke is a toilet flush broadcast over a loudspeaker. Even the naughty language is comparatively innocuous.

          Instead of crassness, the movie focuses on sweet storylines about people nurturing and supporting each other. Murray plays Tripper Harrison, ringleader of the CITs (counselors-in-training) at Camp North Star, an underfunded facility catering to lower-middle-class kids. Tripper’s the quintessential Murray character, a cocky jokester who talks a great anarchistic line even though he’s basically decent; his raison d’être is getting others to loosen up and resist authority. Tripper is also the only properly developed character in the picture, presumably because Murray added interesting flourishes during production. Everyone else is a cliché—the horny nerd, the tweaked pyromaniac, the uptight administrator.

          Most of the story concerns Tripper’s sensitive friendship with a lonely young misfit, Rudy (Chris Makepeace), Tripper’s courtship with fellow CIT Roxanne (Kate Lynch), and Camp North Star’s various run-ins with the stuck-up folks at neighboring Camp Mohawk. Yet the story is primarily just a string of random vignettes until the climax, when the camps face off in a sports competition. (Cue rousing music as unlikely hero Rudy saves the day.) Though generally pleasant to watch, Meatballs lacks anything particularly memorable—excepting, of course, Murray’s wiseass persona—but Makepeace, who later starred in My Bodyguard (1980), does a lot with a little, turning his thinly written character into a empathetic screen presence. Furthermore, it’s hard not to root for the ne’er-do-wells at Camp North Star, and Murray’s appeal is undeniable.

Meatballs: FUNKY