Charley Varrick and Hopscotch

For years, our family was subjected to an obscure Walter Matthau film from 1980, “Hopscotch”, about an involuntarily retired CIA officer, Miles Kendig, who decides to write unauthorized memoirs and leads his erstwhile comrades and the KGB on a humorous wild goose chase across Europe and the US.  My father loved the film and had memorized half the lines, much to our annoyance, but the memories of his obsession are now endearing and sentimental since he’s been gone. 

 Matthau had an earlier film in a similar vein, from 1973, “Charley Varrick”.  He plays a small-time crook, a former crop dusting/barnstormer, who robs a small New Mexico bank with his comrade, Harland (Andrew Robinson, the “Scorpio” killer in “Dirty Harry” and much later, Garak, the Cardassian tailor/spy on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”).  When the pair count the loot back at Charlie’s trailer after a successfully getaway, Charlie realizes they have a major problem.  Instead of $5,000 – the likely contents of a small town bank vault – they have $750,000, which is probably Mob money.  So now instead of just the local sheriff (William Schallert, the station manager in “Trouble With Tribbles”) they have a mob hitman, played by Joe Don Baker (best known for playing Felix Leiter, Bond’s CIA counterpart, in the early Sean Connery Bond films) chasing after them; the Mob won’t bother with search warrants and habeas corpus, and won’t give up until he’s dead.  Even John Vernon, aka “Dean Wurmer” from “Animal House”, is in here as the main mobster trying to get his money back.  The rest of the film is Varrick’s clever scheme to evade the hitman and cover his tracks, permanently.  It’s very entertaining, an underrated 70s action adventure film.

 “Hopscotch” is based on a novel for which the plot is – for all intents and purposes – the same as the movie, though the movie is somewhat more humorous and lighthearted than the novel.  Kendig is brought back to Langley for a desk job, an assignment he definitely does not enjoy.  He abruptly leaves the Agency and begins writing his memoirs.  He mails each chapter of the manuscript directly to his former superior (Ned Beatty) and to his counterpart at the KGB.  The KGB man is considerably more amused than Beatty, but both agree that Kendig is airing dirty laundry which could cause both sides a lot of problems.  Unfortunately, catching him is quite a challenge:  he never stays in one place long enough and is constantly throwing them off the trail, sometimes in a very mocking fashion:  at one point he rents Beatty’s summer house in South Carolina, which the FBI then shoot up.  He’s assisted by Glenda Jackson (I believe her character was absent from the book), an Austrian aristocrat who appreciates his sense of humor, as exasperating as it is sometimes.   His replacement, Joe Cutter (Sam Waterston) is in awe of his mentor and acutely recognizes the futility of the apprentice trying to beat the master at his own game.  Finally – as you can imagine – Kendig sews the whole thing up quite convincingly.  As often as I’ve seen it, I can still recommend it to anyone who hasn’t been subjected to it countless times.