Hopscotch
        
Director: Ronald Neame
Year: 1980
Rating: 6.5
You won't likely find a spy film that is more casual and relaxed as this one is without an ounce of tension or excitement. But it wasn't meant to be anything but what it is. A genteel stroll through Europe and America that calls itself a chase with stops in London, Vienna, Salzburg, Bermuda, Washington DC, Georgia, France and Munich. It is a merry sly chase indeed. It was the sort of film that parents could take their teenage children to and not worry about violence or sex. Perhaps making beer drinking look good was its biggest sin. Walter Matthau is at his most charming with his grumpy jowls and sarcastic digs. He is teamed up with Glenda Jackson who at the time was considered one of the best English actresses in the world after Sunday Bloody Sunday, Women in Love, A Touch of Class and with Matthau in the big hit House Calls. She was a no-nonsense serious actress who gave up acting in the early 1990s to join the Labour Party and run for Parliament. Which she won. Ned Beatty, Sam Waterston, Herbert Lom and Matthau's son David are along for the ride.

 

Kendig (Matthau) runs the European CIA and has just rounded up a Soviet spy ring. But he allows the top Soviet spy Yaskov (Lom) to escape. He did it as he explains to his boss Myerson (Beatty) in D.C. because he knows how Yaskov operates and if they send in a new man, it could change everything. But Myerson has just been looking for an excuse to bench Kendig and this is it. He assigns him to a desk job and promotes Cutter (Waterston) to his position. Kendig doesn't take well to this demotion and steals his personal file and flies to Austria where he hooks up with Isobel (Jackson), an old flame with lots of money. He goes to stay with her in Salzburg and decides to write a book. About CIA past operations. Embarrassing ones. To both sides. And he mails it out chapter by chapter to different intelligence organizations all over the world. It is a basic fuck you to Myerson and the CIA for what they did to him.

 

Both America and the Russians want to stop him and the slow travelogue chase begins. Kendig is a pro and understands exactly how they will go after him and he manages with ease to thumb his nose at them and stay a step or two ahead while intentionally misleading them. Again, very casual. He never looks worried or hurried, even at one point renting Myerson's vacation home under a phony name and setting up a police shoot-out to destroy the house while he safely looks on from a distance. It is a cute idea - poking fun at the CIA - but it is Matthau that makes it work. He was the premier sophisticated comedy star at the time and had engendered a great deal of public good will with The Odd Couple, The Fortune Cookie, Cactus Flower, A New Leaf, Plaza Suite, Pete n' Tilly, The Front Page, The Sunshine Boys and California Suite. It was quite a series of films with a few off-ramp stops for more serious fare with The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Laughing Policeman and Charley Varrick. I sometimes forget just how big he was in the 60s and 70s. Makes me want to revisit those films.