Ronald Neame’s cheeky spy comedy Hopscotch isn’t
quite an awful movie, but it’s so thoroughly and relentlessly mediocre that
one has to wonder how it managed to find its way into the usually excellent
series of DVDs in The Criterion Collection. There are several films in their
collection by directors that are less well known (The Blob, The
Vanishing), and there might be a few movies that are worse (The Rock
springs to mind), but out of the 150 or so films that they’ve selected to this
point, this is clearly their least interesting choice. The reason that I bring
up its DVD release is because I sincerely doubt I’d ever have seen the film
had it not been selected by Criterion for release. Neame (The Poseidon
Adventure) is a hack director whose oeuvre I don’t have much interest in
exploring and Walter Matthau, star of Hopscotch is far from my favorite
actor. After viewing the film, my opinion of the two hasn’t changed a bit.
In Hopscotch’s early scenes, we’re introduced to
Kendig (Matthau), an amicable CIA agent who doesn’t use a gun and is on
friendly terms with enemy agents. He seems to be completely complacent in his
position in life, and after he uses his quirky techniques to quickly overthrow a
Soviet operation, instead of waiting for the okay from his superiors, he’s
quickly kicked out of the agency. When he confronts his chief (Ned Beatty), he
starts talking tough, and the switch in his persona seems a betrayal of the
character that has been built up to that point. It soon becomes apparent,
however, that this is par for the course in Hopscotch, where characters
often change their attitudes to fit the demands of the silly plot. Matthau is in
nearly every scene of the film, and nearly nothing ever rises above the
doddering tone that he sets with his performance. The film is presumably meant
to be playful, since it follows him as he extracts his bloodless revenge on
those who have supposedly wronged him, but since Matthau never manages to exude
much charm, it feels less playful than inconsequential. His character listens to
classical music, and often whistles or hums a few bars of it between the scenes
where he mugs for the screen, but nothing adds any class to this wreck. The décor
is filled with ugly artifacts from the early ‘80s that might be temporally
correct, but are visual eyesores. The romance that springs up between him and a
wealthy widow (Glenda Jackson) is mostly gross, since the age difference between
the two is so horribly evident. When they embraced, my stomach almost turned.
Thankfully, there’s no nudity.
Hopscotch
attempts to build suspense occasionally, by keeping us in the dark about how
Kendig’s plans will unfold, but it completely fails to since it’s stuck in
the same slack jawed mode in every scene. There’s next to nothing that
resembles a set piece or an action sequence for almost the entire running time,
which must distinguish it in some way from nearly every other spy thriller ever
made. Unfortunately, there’s not much of interest in the stead of action. The
dialogue is absolutely dreadful in spots. The most apropos moment came when
Jackson’s character chastised Matthau’s by exclaiming, “This is
indefensible!” as he walks around dressed as a cartoon Arab. Indeed, this
scene, like and many more in the film, is. If watching Matthau imitate Eleanor
Roosevelt on the telephone sounds like a good time, then by all means check out Hopscotch.
For the rest of humanity, I’d recommend Criterion’s DVD of a much better
light spy thriller, the Cary Grant / Audrey Hepburn bauble Charade, in
which Matthau coincidentally plays the villain of the piece.
