By Charlotte Ross
Norman Taurog’s The Caddy screens tomorrow, July 22nd, at The Cinema Museum, presented by I’ll Say She Is.
The Caddy (1953) is a slapstick sports comedy, ostensibly just another of sixteen commercial features thrown together to capitalise on the ever-expanding Martin and Lewis empire. The film released at the height of the double act’s success in the early fifties, when they were inciting levels of mass hysteria that director Norman Taurog described as “almost orgiastic”. It is constrained by all the trappings of generic formula, including superfluous romantic subplots, zany golfing set-pieces and the eventual triumph of a downtrodden misfit.
But scratch beneath the surface and its formulaic veneer splinters quickly, as The Caddy is far less concerned with golf or romance than it is with the tenuous codependence of its two leads. From its opening number ‘What Would You Do Without Me?’ the film toys with Dean and Jerry’s volatile intimacy, anticipating their breakup and teasing the wry homoeroticism that underpinned their act from its nightclub origins.
On stage, Martin and Lewis’s boundary-smashing liveness was characterised by an antagonistic intimacy: simultaneously hostile and tender. Lewis was relentlessly demonstrative in his devotion to Martin, ever-persistent in his self-appointed mission to solicit Martin’s affection and admonishment in equal measure. His comic persona, id-driven monkey to Martin’s handsome keeper, was one of infantile emasculation forged in opposition to Martin’s rugged self-assurance.
So too in The Caddy. In its frequent melodramatic turns, Lewis’s doting caddy is coded as the spurned housewife of Martin’s unflappable golfer, who turns a blind eye to Lewis’ explicitly feminised adoration in favour of sport and womanising. Rendered effectively impotent by his fear of performing in front of a crowd, Lewis plays desperate, fractured masculinity to pathetic effect against Martin’s neglectful virility.
Scanning Letterboxd reviews of The Caddy, it becomes clear that a contingent of modern film buffs are drawn to its queer overtones. It would be simple to dismiss this as contemporary reappraisal shaped by internet culture, but doing so risks flattening the historical specificity of their comedy and its broader cultural resonance. Formed in 1946, Martin and Lewis operated on an emotional register shaped by the recent memory of wartime homosociality. While their comedy exploited this atmosphere, it also probed the limits of acceptable male attachment in a climate increasingly gripped by McCarthyist moral panic.
Critics hurled accusations of deviance against Lewis for his overreliance on “nance stuff”, “running too much to effeminacy”, and for his portrayals of “prancing imbeciles and mincing homosexuals”. Even the most empathetic readings were steeped in medicalised homophobia, diagnosing Lewis’ supposed “latent homosexuality” in terms of pathological attachment and maternal substitution. The watchful eye of J Edgar Hoover was also trained on Lewis, whose FBI file was peppered with absurd unsubstantiated evidence of his homosexuality, including a leaked promotional outtake for The Caddy in which Martin jokingly dismissed him as a “cocksucker”
This did little to diminish their popularity, as Martin and Lewis remained among the most consistent moneymakers in Hollywood throughout their ten-year partnership. If anything, their closeness was a significant factor in their appeal. Though this may seem
counterintuitive, film scholar Ed Sikov has aptly characterised this phenomenon as the duo “[playing] with the sexual side of buddyism for dangerous comic effect, turning a kind of vicarious homosexual panic on the part of audiences into pleasure by way of nervous laughter”
Sikov’s implication of managed subversion suggests that their comedy offered both release and reassurance. In the increasingly conservative post-war era, Martin and Lewis’ gleeful derision of convention provided a safe form of social transgression. Social norms may be momentarily destabilised, this instability may even be sustained across a feature film. But social order will always be restored: whether through an unconvincing heterosexual clinch, through Dean and Jerry’s contemporary promotion as respectable family men, or through the internal logic of the act itself.
Though they frequently (and giddily) flouted their own rules, their act essentially operated on the understanding that Lewis embodied chaos and Martin embodied
composure. In films like The Caddy their dynamic is rendered in its simplest form, largely stripped of the fluidity of their live act and bifurcated into two distinct personas: the straight man and the comic. Within this structure, their tongue-in-cheek homoeroticism functioned as part of a wider system of contained disorder in which Dean stood in for social order and control, and Jerry for its blatant violation.
Dean’s very presence curtails the societal anxieties Jerry provokes: there will always be someone to stop it from going too far. When Jerry shrieks and lurches, Dean offers stability. With a firm hand and a knowing smirk he reassures us (the audience) not to worry.
Everything is under control.
Norman Taurog’s The Caddy screens tomorrow at The Cinema Museum, presented by I’ll Say She Is.