On Hopscotch (1980), Part 1
From Walter Matthau to Walter Matthau, by way of cartoon sheepdogs, Chris Rock, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Death Wish, Jeff Goldblum bumming smokes from Steppenwolf, and Glenda Jackson
When I teach fiction workshop, I often ask students to introduce us to a story they love. One aim of the assignment is to make us consider WHY we love the things we do. Enthusiasm is often said to be infectious, but has anyone done the virological grunt-work to figure out just how contagious it is and under what circumstances it hops from host to host? How do you explain what thrills you? Can you persuade others to be similarly thrilled?
There’s a second set of questions, a more uncomfortable one, beneath. What does it mean to make a recommendation? On what grounds do we urge others to spend their time and attention on the things—produced by us or by others—that give us pleasure? To what extent do our tastes arise from—and reveal—not our own thoughtful choices and idiosyncrasies, as we hope, but half-considered allegiances or prejudices based on our experience, our educational or socioeconomic status, our ethnicity, tribe, sexuality, gender, privilege?
All this is to say that “Pick something you love, share it with us, and tell us why you love it and how it links to your own ambitions as a writer” is a deceptively difficult prompt. It requires some awkward introspection.
I’ve been thinking about ways to make the assignment less daunting, and it occurred to me that one thing I could do is broaden the field and ask students to share an effect, tone, narrative move, or emotional tug they’ve discovered in some OTHER artistic genre—painting, ballet, longform TV, gaming, cinema, whatever--and would like to riff on or re-create in their own fiction.
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Which brings us to my subject for today: the delightful 1980 movie Hopscotch, a caper/thriller (more soon on that descriptor) that stars Walter Matthau at his pouchy, cranky best, alongside a very good but too-rarely-onscreen Glenda Jackson. The premise is simple: Miles Kendig is a CIA bureau chief in West Germany in the midst of the Cold War. In the movie’s opening scene, at a Munich beer hall during Oktoberfest, he disrupts a drop and seizes some film from his KGB counterpart.
The interaction between the two men is reminiscent of Ralph and Sam, the cartoon coyote and sheepdog that Looney Tunes introduced in the early 1950s.1 Matthau makes an excellent Sam—he even resembles the cartoon dog a little (it’s a Berger de Brie, I am informed). But Kendig’s old-fashioned professionalism (he and Comrade Yaskov are geopolitical foes but fellow guild members, with the mutual respect that comes with familiarity) no longer plays with the remorseless “dirty-tricks” regime that’s seized control of the agency back home; he’s summoned to Langley. There his boss, Myerson, a supremely snivelly bureaucrat (played by Ned Beatty) whose imagination-free, zero-sum thinking makes him not only Kendig’s natural foil but a danger to all of us—informs Kendig that from now on he’ll be riding a desk. His field-op days are over.
Kendig swipes his own personnel file, shreds it, then flies off to Salzburg to visit an old flame and fellow retired spy, Isobel von Schönenberg (played by Jackson), while he licks his wounds and plots revenge. To make Myerson sweat, he makes a point of meeting in public with Yaskov (played by Herbert Lom2 , who as Inspector Dreyfus ticced and twitched so heroically through the run of Clouseau films). Yaskov dutifully asks Kendig to switch sides, and when he declines, jokingly asks what he’s planning to do instead: write his tell-all memoirs?
Which sends Kendig to the typewriter. He delivers his manuscript chapter by chapter to all the world’s major intelligence organizations while promising that the blockbuster exposé will come in the finale, at which point he’ll seek a publisher. Myerson orders Kendig found, delegating the task to Miles’s protégé and successor, Cutter (Sam Waterston). Cutter believes that Kendig is just stylishly venting, and if left alone will stop short of any damaging public revelations.
But Kendig continues writing, and he keeps twisting the knife deeper into Myerson as, with help from old agency contacts, fake IDs, Isobel to run interference, and the cloak-and-dagger deftness he’s developed over decades in the field, he hopscotches from the US to the Caribbean to Europe, always one step ahead of his nemesis. After an especially pointed taunt—posing as a man recovering from a prostate operation (wink, wink), Kendig rents the coastal-Georgia cabin he overheard Myerson mention owning (more on this in a bit) and makes it into a writing retreat—Myerson orders his killing. Cutter is a friend and admirer of Kendig, and he’s been not so subtly rooting for his old boss, but he’s also a company man who understands that a line has been crossed and who in the end will do what he must. He calls Isobel to tell her what his orders are and asks her to persuade Kendig to call off his revenge and disappear.
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The film was adapted from a 1976 Edgar-Award-winning novel by the dizzyingly prolific Brian Garfield, who published sixty novels by the time he was barely forty, and who (in case you want to write him off as a churner of insta-schlock) in 1970, at thirty, was a Pulitzer finalist in History for his book The Thousand-Mile War: WWII in Alaska and the Aleutians. Garfield is best known now, though, especially in film circles, as the author of Death Wish, basis of the infamous Charles Bronson vehicle that ignited 1970s Vigilante Cinema.3 On the one hand, Death Wish provided Garfield plenty of pelf and fame; on the other, he was deeply uncomfortable with the ways the movie had departed from the novel. He called the resulting movie irresponsible and “incendiary”; director Michael Winner retorted by calling him “an idiot.”
Given the fervor of Garfield’s objections, it’s a surprise to discover that the plot differences between novel and film are minimal. The gulf between them lies in tone. The book’s moral ambivalence about vigilantism becomes, in the movie, gung-ho bloodlust. A lot of this owes to a fateful casting decision. Winner had just finished a film with Charles Bronson called The Stone Killers, and he was looking for another vehicle for collaboration. When he told Bronson that the best script he had on hand was one about a mild-mannered liberal CPA who, after his wife and daughter are attacked, starts shooting muggers, Bronson supposedly responded, “I’d like to do that.”
“This script.”
“No. Shoot muggers.”
Later, Bronson would graciously say that he was “miscast” in the role as originally written—and say, perhaps a hint less graciously, that the role as written originally would have been better for someone like Dustin Hoffman, who “could play a weaker kind of man.” Once Bronson was attached to the project, a vigilante like the one in Garfield’s novel, a reluctant, self-loathing, milquetoasty middle-aged accountant named Paul Benjamin, was no longer a possibility. Over several revisions, the character was renamed Paul Kersey (hmm), and the script morphed into a vehicle for deadpan mustachioed ass-walloping of the Bronson kind.4
Garfield immediately wrote a sequel, Death Sentence (1975). Whether this should count as an act of principled protest or an exploitation of the film’s notoriety is muddied a bit by the fact that Garfield picks up not where his novel left Paul Benjamin but where the movie left Paul Kersey: exiled to Chicago. But Death Sentence makes very clear Garfield’s non-endorsement of vigilantism. In it, a copycat killer is blowing away hoods, endangering innocents, and eventually it becomes Paul Benjamin’s role—the analogy here to Garfield’s role as writer/avenging angel is clear and pointed--to hunt down and stop the dangerous force he has unleashed.
(note how the cover of this 1976 mass-market edition doesn’t exactly play DOWN the Bronson links)
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Garfield didn’t usually adapt films made from his novels. Hopscotch is, so far as I know, the lone exception. And it makes sense that it would be—different as Death Wish and Hopscotch are, they have a good bit in common. Both involve middle-aged loners taking vengeance outside a system that’s stupid, feeble, nonsensical, unfit. And both are explicitly about a kind of masculinity that feels threatened (a subject underscored, in Hopscotch, by the casting as chief antagonist of Beatty, who’d come to fame a few years before as Victimized Man, made to “squeal like a pig” in Deliverance).
The novel Hopscotch is much grimmer, more world-weary, than the movie. Adapted straightforwardly, the film would look much more like, say, early-‘70s Disillusionment Cinema or nuclear-brink thrillers. But in this case, the tonal transformation from the book was going to be dramatically different, almost diametrically opposite, from what happened in the bending of Death Wish to Bronson.
And that metamorphosis--from thriller toward caper, to become what one reviewer would call the world’s first feel-good Cold War spy flick, was again going to be sparked by a casting decision.
(PART TWO should be ready in a few days.)
Off-the-job pals, we see them greet each other (“Mornin’, Sam,'“ “Mornin’, Ralph,” a refrain that’s been paid tribute to all over the pop-culture universe ever since, in everything from Veronica Mars to Family Guy to Suits to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, in a Lara Croft Tomb Raider video game, even a Chris Rock bit about racism. The work chums stow their lunchboxes, clock in with punchcards . . . and then the dog (often shown half-napping) phlegmatically but ruthlessly thwarts the coyote’s every Acme-aided attempt at sheep-rustling. At day’s end they punch out, chatting amiably, and head home.
whose given name turns out to be Charles Angelo Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru! “Lom” is a miracle of compression.
Death Wish is quite reasonably seen, from the distance of a half-century, as the film that launched a thousand hollow-points—not only in the Bronson series (for reasons of Garfield’s copyright, they could not be called sequels) and in the later Dirty Harry oeuvre but in dozens of other vengeance films ranging from cheap exploitation flicks to, arguably, classic prestige pictures like Taxi Driver. But it’s fairer to call it a distillation or maybe mainstreaming of a trend that had begun in movies like Born Losers (1967—the first of the Billy Jacks) and Coffy (1973), to cite a couple.
Death Wish featured several notable film debuts: Jeff Goldblum as one of the “freak” home invaders/rapists/murderers; Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, not yet a Sweathog, as a hood who has the bad luck of encountering Kersey. And it featured Christopher Guest’s debut in a named role, as a precinct cop.
Footnote to the footnote: One of the producers was the manager of the rock band Steppenwolf, of “Born to Be Wild” fame. Apparently he introduced Goldblum to keyboardist Goldy McJohn, who would later refer to Goldblum as his “cigarette-bumming friend.”
Footnote to the footnote to the the footnote: ironic, in the context, that Steppenwolf was named after the 1927 Herman Hesse novel about a middle-aged man working out whether to be feral or civilized—a novel that Hesse all his life would complain was misunderstood—hijacked by those who wanted to wallow in its darker precincts.