Caddyshack

Caddyshack is the greatest golf comedy ever made and one of the most quotable films in American cinema. Harold Ramis assembled an impossible cast — Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, and Ted Knight — and essentially let them loose on a country club set with minimal scripting. The result is a gloriously anarchic film that uses golf as a backdrop for class warfare disguised as comedy.

Rodney Dangerfield's Al Czervik is a walking demolition crew, a nouveau riche loudmouth who offends every sensibility of the old-money club members. His verbal sparring with Ted Knight's pompous Judge Smails is comedy gold — two men from different worlds who despise each other for the same reason: neither belongs. Bill Murray, in a role that was barely scripted, created the immortal groundskeeper Carl Spackler, whose war against a gopher became the film's most beloved subplot.

Chevy Chase floats through the film as Ty Webb, a zen-golf philosopher whose serene indifference to competition is both hilarious and oddly wise. Caddyshack is not a great sports film in the traditional sense — the golf is almost incidental. But it is the definitive film about the absurdity of country club culture, and it proved that sports comedies could be as enduring as the serious films they parody.