Hopscotch
This is an odd film, rather a late entry in the ‘Cold War Espionage’ genre that produced some memorable movies during the 1960s and 1970s. It would make a good pair with BURN AFTER READING for a double feature. It is based on a novel that I have not read, which apparently had a more serious tone that the film adopts. It is not without merits, but I was troubled by one particular aspect of it, to which I shall return.
Before that, I would like to consider the way the film differs from its equivalents some fifteen years or more earlier. In the 1960s, long-distance travel wasn’t something available to most people – to some extent it still isn’t. By 1980, though, various factors had brought down the relative price of air travel and, although such a trip would still involve a considerable sum, more and more people had at least a passing acquaintance with the sights of Europe. The result is a film with less of a travelogue element, less of a window onto the world of some imaginary jet set.
Instead of a jet set, we get a film about a mid-life crisis. Miles Kendig (Walter Matthau) is a field agent for the CIA. The film opens with him at an Oktoberfest celebration where he disrupts an attempted delivery of secret information to the Soviet KGB. Instead of being celebrated on his return home, his new boss Myerson (Ned Beatty) punishes him by taking him off active duty and consigning him to the filing department. Myerson wanted Kendig to detain the Head of the KGB in Europe, who was present at the transfer. Kendig prefers to quit, and does so in such a way that destroys the CIA records on him, a much easier task in that era of paper documents. And he promises to write a memoir detailing a lot of things the CIA would rather not see published for all to read.
The remainder of the film is a chase as the CIA pursues Kendig in both Europe and the United States. There isn’t a lot of suspense, and Kendig is as much seeking to destroy the reputation of Myerson as to elude capture. He is assisted by his girlfriend Isobel (Glenda Jackson). There isn’t a lot of romantic chemistry between Matthau and Jackson, more a mood of mutual respect one finds in married couples in mid-life. In fact, and now coming back to the aspect that troubled me, I don’t find any of the actors especially convincing in their roles. Whether that’s a flaw of casting or direction is not something I can say, but it really hurts the film.
In its own time, the film captures the shifting attitudes between a 1977 détente film like TELEFON and the returning Cold War of incoming Reagan presidency and the Clint Eastwood vehicle FIREFOX. Myerson is the confrontational Cold Warrior, while Kendig prefers a more subtle competitive coexistence. Kendig sounds like he is the smart one, but it would also be the case that Myerson’s approach would put Kendig in the KGB cross-hairs. How much is Kendig just opting for a quiet life rather than remembering that a war ultimately has winners and losers, and trying to make sure the CIA is the former?
While the film takes the side of détente, we know that in the end the Myersons got the USSR to wave a white flag, and send the world down a road that brought us to the slaughter in the Ukraine that has followed the 2022 Russian military operation. (Now we confront a possibly pending expansion of that war with attendant risk of nuclear holocaust.) Nor does the film take any particular ideological position about the Cold War. That’s what makes me see the film more as providing a more entertaining setting than one about an older executive being pushed out by a young thruster rising in the ranks of Consolidated Multinational Enterprises. If your girlfriend is rich enough, you can just forget about the whole thing and ride off into your sunset years, laughing all the way.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
Before that, I would like to consider the way the film differs from its equivalents some fifteen years or more earlier. In the 1960s, long-distance travel wasn’t something available to most people – to some extent it still isn’t. By 1980, though, various factors had brought down the relative price of air travel and, although such a trip would still involve a considerable sum, more and more people had at least a passing acquaintance with the sights of Europe. The result is a film with less of a travelogue element, less of a window onto the world of some imaginary jet set.
Instead of a jet set, we get a film about a mid-life crisis. Miles Kendig (Walter Matthau) is a field agent for the CIA. The film opens with him at an Oktoberfest celebration where he disrupts an attempted delivery of secret information to the Soviet KGB. Instead of being celebrated on his return home, his new boss Myerson (Ned Beatty) punishes him by taking him off active duty and consigning him to the filing department. Myerson wanted Kendig to detain the Head of the KGB in Europe, who was present at the transfer. Kendig prefers to quit, and does so in such a way that destroys the CIA records on him, a much easier task in that era of paper documents. And he promises to write a memoir detailing a lot of things the CIA would rather not see published for all to read.
The remainder of the film is a chase as the CIA pursues Kendig in both Europe and the United States. There isn’t a lot of suspense, and Kendig is as much seeking to destroy the reputation of Myerson as to elude capture. He is assisted by his girlfriend Isobel (Glenda Jackson). There isn’t a lot of romantic chemistry between Matthau and Jackson, more a mood of mutual respect one finds in married couples in mid-life. In fact, and now coming back to the aspect that troubled me, I don’t find any of the actors especially convincing in their roles. Whether that’s a flaw of casting or direction is not something I can say, but it really hurts the film.
In its own time, the film captures the shifting attitudes between a 1977 détente film like TELEFON and the returning Cold War of incoming Reagan presidency and the Clint Eastwood vehicle FIREFOX. Myerson is the confrontational Cold Warrior, while Kendig prefers a more subtle competitive coexistence. Kendig sounds like he is the smart one, but it would also be the case that Myerson’s approach would put Kendig in the KGB cross-hairs. How much is Kendig just opting for a quiet life rather than remembering that a war ultimately has winners and losers, and trying to make sure the CIA is the former?
While the film takes the side of détente, we know that in the end the Myersons got the USSR to wave a white flag, and send the world down a road that brought us to the slaughter in the Ukraine that has followed the 2022 Russian military operation. (Now we confront a possibly pending expansion of that war with attendant risk of nuclear holocaust.) Nor does the film take any particular ideological position about the Cold War. That’s what makes me see the film more as providing a more entertaining setting than one about an older executive being pushed out by a young thruster rising in the ranks of Consolidated Multinational Enterprises. If your girlfriend is rich enough, you can just forget about the whole thing and ride off into your sunset years, laughing all the way.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
Mini Review: This is an odd film, rather a late entry in the ‘Cold War Espionage’ genre that produced some memorable movies during the 1960s and 1970s. But, instead of a jet set, we get a film about a mid-life crisis.
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