If you’ve been wondering why in this day and age, when Hollywood seems to be doing nothing but recycling old movies, no one has thought to remake Topper, consider this: it’s essentially a story in which driving drunk at breakneck speed around dangerous curves with your feet on the steering wheel of a convertible is seen as not just funny, but also as a paradigm for living the good life. Party animals George and Marian Kerby (Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, bouncing screwball dialogue like Ping-Pong champs) become ghosts because of such antics, and they soon learn they’ve got a pretty short resume for applying for residence in Heaven. They set out to do a good deed: loosening up repressed bank president Cosmo Topper (Roland Young), who is henpecked by his propriety-conscious wife and who leads as dull a life as you can imagine. A kind of morality-tale act of retribution on Roaring Twenties hedonism, Topper is also completely 1930s in its battery of platinum blondes in slinky sequined evening dresses, men in tuxes and top hats driving roadsters, bankers in fedoras, and dancing in nightclubs.
Monthly Archives: August 2014
Tin Cup (1996)
Ron Shelton’s making his incisive way through the major sports (let’s hope he hasn’t given up before getting to boccie), and here he rampages across the green with Kevin Costner’s gone-to-seed golf rogue, who’s trying to qualify for the U.S. Open in order to impress Rene Russo. Because it’s Shelton, Tin Cup is probably the most faithful movie ever made about the game, even if it’s too long and Costner’s aging rapscallion pales after a while.
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Caddyshack (1980)
The pivotal National Lampoon/Saturday Night Live–era comedy, co-written and directed by Harold Ramis, in which gophers run amok, Chevy Chase hits droll notes (this was back when he was funny), Bill Murray invents Carl the groundskeeper, Ted Knight bursts a blood vessel, and Rodney Dangerfield asks who, in fact, stepped on a duck. There’s more. Caddyshack is a bit of a mess, but golfers can’t go wrong with this film, especially if they’re loaded.
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Pat and Mike (1952)
Katharine Hepburn is a pro golfer, Spencer Tracy is her promoter, and Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon’s screenplay gives them helping after helping of gender-combat banter, on and off the course (we’re treated to the sight of Hepburn herself, in a championship game, hitting against legendary real-life pro Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who was the subject of the 1975 TV movie Babe). Pat and Mike is perhaps the best of the Hepburn-Tracy comedies—because here, Tracy doesn’t always get the upper hand.
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The Idle Class (1921)
This vintage Charlie Chaplin two-reeler (amounting to about thirty minutes) is the first notable golf comedy: Chaplin’s Tramp infiltrates an aristocratic golf club and shows up the snobs. The brilliant pratfall gags in The Idle Class are so concise you’d think they were digitally timed.
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