On Hopscotch, Part 2
Matthau to Matthau by way of Turk Thrust, Elton and Groucho, Nepo Babies, a Trump Joke in Questionable Taste, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sensurround, Mozart, MLK, and Kierkegaard with a Hurdy-Gurdy Score
Brian Garfield’s credited co-writer on Hopscotch was the (laaaaaaate-)Renaissance man Bryan Forbes. Over a career that spanned six decades, Forbes covered the cultural waterfront (and the landfront and the airfront, should those things exist and need covering).
Forbes appeared in thirty or so films, often in small or uncredited roles. Perhaps the best-known of these, for an unusual reason, was his turn in a nudist-camp scene in A Shot in the Dark (1964), the second of Blake Edwards’ Clouseau films. As an inside joke, it seems, Forbes was billed as “Turk Thrust.” Two decades later, in the legendary bomb Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), Edwards performed the stunt-casting feat of having then-James-Bond Roger Moore appear in a cameo AS CLOUSEAU.1 So as to spring the surprise, Moore needed a pseudonym. He became Turk Thrust II.
Forbes was a director, too, most notably of The Stepford Wives in 1965. He also besat the stenciled chair for King Rat in 1965 and for 1961’s Whistle Down the Wind, in which a group of children (among them Nepo Baby Hayley Mills, daughter of the woman who wrote the novel on which the film was based) discover a wounded wife-murderer in their barn and mistake him for the second coming of Christ. The movie would later become an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical . . . and later yet, one trembles to think, a template for GOP presidential politics circa 2024. But perhaps Forbes’s most relevant experience for Hopscotch was a gig he passed up. Asked in the early 1960s to direct the first Bond feature, he turned it down because he thought Dr. No would be just another “bang-bang” film. (One source suggests that Forbes was originally slated to direct Hopscotch, too, but had to pull out.)
Forbes published more than a dozen novels (including International Velvet, novelization of the horsy-schmaltz sequel he directed in 1978) and four nonfiction books; he was briefly a film-studio head, at EMI in 1970-71; and for several years he owned a village bookshop that never made money but that Forbes considered a necessity of civilized life. Another fascinating (and accidental) sidelight was as an album-art photographer—in 1973, Forbes directed the ur-rockumentary Elton John and Bernie Taupin Say Goodbye Norma Jean and Other Things, and this led to his contributing images for the album covers of that year’s Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player2 and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
As a screenwriter—leaving aside Hopscotch, for which he would receive a Writers’ Guild Award for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium—Forbes is probably best-known for Only Two Can Play, based on the Kingsley Amis novel That Uncertain Feeling and starring Peter Sellers3, and the 1992 biopic Chaplin, for which Robert Downey Jr. would earn an Oscar nomination.
*
The eventual director of Hopscotch was another British veteran, Ronald Neame. “Veteran” is in this case perhaps an understatement: in 1929, Neame was a camera operator on the very first British talkie, Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Fifteen years later, Cineguild, Neame’s partnership with David Lean and Anthony Havelock-Allan, would result in several shared Oscar screenplay nominations. The trio specialized in adapting works by Noël Coward and then Charles Dickens, and the partnership foundered when their version of Oliver Twist featured a Fagin, played by Alec Guinness, that veered into antisemitic stereotype.4 Neame then moved into directing, and among others he helmed the terrific Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)5, which won Maggie Smith her first Oscar, and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), which Neame—who lived to ninety-nine—would call the favorite film of his career because it paid for a long and comfortable retirement.
*
As I mentioned, the crucial step in Hopscotch’s evolution from spy-lurking tome to skylarking caper was a casting decision. Matthau agreed to star, but on the condition that the role of Miles Kendig—and thus the tone of the film—be reworked to suit his skills. Over the previous four years, as the project evolved, Garfield had already produced more than twenty drafts. Now both Neame and Matthau would participate in feverish rewrites that continued all the way through filming.
First, though, a couple of things had to be negotiated. Many Matthau relatives had perished in the Holocaust, and the actor initially refused to film in Germany, but in time he relented, extracting as compensation the casting—Nepo Babies 2!—of his son David and later his stepdaughter Lucy Saroyan, who was struggling after a traumatic split from her adored father, the writer William Saroyan--around the time of the shooting of Hopscotch, the elder Saroyan described himself in a memoir as “an idiot father of a young and stupid son and a younger and more stupid daughter.” (Lucy plays an aquaplane pilot who helps Kendig disappear, and as she drops him off, she remarks, “You remind me of my father.” “Yeah, replies Kendig/Matthau. “That’s always been my problem.”)6
Also to accommodate Matthau, a Mozart lover, the filmmakers decided to feature the Salzburg composer prominently in the soundtrack . . . and in doing so realized that having Kendig be an opera fan would help stitch the movie together. That decision yielded, among other things, a wonderful scene in which Miles attracts attention by loudly singing an aria, “Largo al Factotum” from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, through a border crossing that he makes in a flashy convertible. “Ready for anything, night and day, I’m always on the move,” goes the translation. “Hey, Figaro! I'm here./ Figaro here,/ Figaro there, Figaro up, Figaro down,/ Swifter and swifter I'm like a spark.”
Matthau’s presence also attracted Glenda Jackson, with whom he’d worked a couple years earlier in House Calls.
Matthau’s contributions to the final version were multifaceted. He ad-libbed dialogue; he found a Mozart accompaniment for scenes when Kendig was typing (a task the music team had been struggling with). He transformed an early scene—the one that introduces Isobel--that was too exposition-heavy; it became, instead, a quick, subtext-y repartee about wine that culminates in a kiss. Matthau also contributed the idea for the final scene, in which Kendig appears at a bookstore in disguise as a Sikh (Dangerous Ethnic Makeup Decisions 2) to pick up a copy of his own memoir. Neame said Matthau could easily have demanded a writing credit . . . but despite his substantial labors on the script, it may have been his presence as presiding spirit and star that made the largest difference.
Here was a chance for Garfield to reverse what had happened five years earlier, when Death Wish was retooled for maximum mayhem around Bronson, and perhaps, too, for Forbes to create a kind of anti-“bang bang” version of James Bond, starring a rumpled almost-sixty-year-old Jewish vaudevillian as superspy.
*
Which brings us back to where we started.
I have a special affection, in fiction and in film, for works that use genre conventions or clichés, and the reader/viewer’s attached expectations, to tweak and reinvigorate the form. Is the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, for example, a sendup of gangster movies or a tribute to them? It is of course both, elaborately and delightfully, simultaneously inhabiting old tropes, spoofing them, riffing on them . . . and in doing so creating new possibilities for the tried-and-true or tired-and-true genre of the mob movie. Miller’s Crossing is a flick about—well, literally, about a man chasing his hat. To me, its great triumph is how much TONAL range it opens up; there are scenes of horrific violence, but those scenes bob in a sea of dark, playful, inventive raillery that feels essentially comic. Have we all seen celluloid Mafia bosses turn the tables on would-be assassins and mow them down? Yes. Have we seen it done on a suburban street by a mob boss in slippers, snuffed bedtime stogie in the pocket of the bathrobe he hurries into when he hears the killers downstairs, while a treacly-sweet and soaring “Danny Boy” plays on the phonograph? It’s like Kierkegaard with a hurdy-gurdy score.
This is one of the roles of Hopscotch’s soundtrack. We have the material of opera seria, but played as opera buffa; the stuff of the spy thriller, but transposed into a slapsticky key. But Hopscotch goes a step farther. Even the substance of the Cold War spy flick gets altered by Kendig’s spirit of fun—and this makes sense. In a way, his battle with Myerson is about what the tone of spycraft should be. For Myerson this is a world, and Kendig a threat, to be taken in deadly earnest. A large part of Kendig’s beef with this worldview is precisely that its tone is off, is dangerous and stupid and counterproductive. The great fun of the film is to watch the humorless cloak-and-dagger bureaucrat get routed again and again . . . is to watch tragedy have its ass handed to it by comedy, deadly get whupped by lively.
Were I to make a workshop presentation about Hopscotch, it would center on the role guns play, and on the ingenious, winking way the moviemakers use their games with that trope to rewire viewers’ expectations. What they do, in essence, is not so much to change a thriller into a caper—one in which no character is killed, wounded, or even arrested—but to parody and rewrite our expectation of the thriller so that the genre, as reconceived, can include a movie that pokes fun at the way violence, in many unthrilling “thrillers,” becomes not a product of narrative tension but a lazy substitute for it. To make a “feel-good” Cold War spy film in 1980, in the era of the Doomsday Clock, fallout shelters, in-school nuclear-winter drills, the moody end-times pop of Joy Division and others: it’s a daring, counterintuitive move. Sure, times are grim; sure, violence is everywhere, and the system is corrupt and stupid and tipping us all toward disaster. But underneath all that, for the two hours one watches Hopscotch, is a fizzy, funny reassurance. Paranoid, brutal zero-sum bureaucrats like Beatty are in charge, but the Matthaus and the Jacksons of the world can run circles around them.
(In part 3, to come shortly, I’ll catalog the clever gunplay the scriptwriters manage to get into the film—all without Kendig ever firing a shot or even, with one brief exception, handling a loaded gun. In creative writing circles we all know Chekhov’s famous imperative. The shotgun on the wall in act one is a promise; it will be fired by play’s end. Hopscotch engages in an elaborate riff on Chekhov: the gun is there from the beginning, we recognize it to be real, and loaded . . . but the implied promise is that it will never go off. Instead, the script is going to show us a dozen clever schemes for making sure that when it gets hauled down and fired, what emerges from the barrel will be a flag—sorry, Mr. Fudd—that reads BANG.)
The film’s premise is that Clouseau has disappeared, and Herbert Lom’s Dreyfus wants badly for him not to be found, so he rigs a computer program to find the world’s SECOND-most-hapless detective, New York’s Clifton Sleigh, to lead the search. Sleigh was portrayed by Ted Wass, who later played Danny Dallas on Soap and the dad on Blossom. After his acting career, Wass became a prolific TV director. Another side note: David Niven was dying of ALS during filming, and his voice was quite faint . . . so in post-production, some of his dialogue had to be dubbed by impressionist Rich Little.
The title came from a party at Groucho Marx’s at which EJ was performing. At one point in the evening Groucho, who’d been razzing his guest all evening, sighted down a finger gun at him, and Elton’s response was “Don’t shoot me—I’m only the piano player.” As a tribute to the man with history’s greatest tape mustache, the movie poster beside the marquee on the album cover (pictured above) is for the Marx Brothers’ Go West.
This film seems like CATNIP for Daniel Galef.
The controversy was much less about Guinness’s portrayal than about the makeup, especially a prosthetic nose designed from the drawings by George Cruikshank that had appeared in an early edition of the novel. Lean was warned of the dangers by makeup artist Stuart Freeborn (later to be celebrated for his design of Yoda and others in the Star Wars films), but a trial run with less exaggerated makeup resulted in a Fagin whom test audiences said resembled Jesus. Lean, fatefully, chose the crooked nose over the messianic one.
You knew I would mention Muriel Spark at my first opportunity, Brock Clarke.
Another child of famous parents who took a small role was Yolanda King, daughter of MLK and Coretta Scott King. And while we’re on intra-essay sequels, here’s Stunt-Casting-Pseudonym 2: Matthau often joked that his real middle name was Foghorn and his original surname Matuschanskayasky . . . and used that name for his cameo as a drunk in the 1974 disaster pic Earthquake, the movie that gave us the glorious, short-lived gimmick called “Sensurround,” which involved the installation of low-frequency subwoofing speakers that made the theater rumble during temblor scenes.