Tonight's Movie: Hopscotch (1980)

Having very recently enjoyed Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson in HOUSE CALLS (1978), I was quite interested in seeing them paired again in HOPSCOTCH (1980).Fortunately I had picked up the Criterion Collection DVD in a half-price sale not long ago, so I didn't have to wait long to watch it.HOPSCOTCH is a lighthearted spy film, the enjoyable type of "midrange" movie released with some frequency decades ago, which is sadly largely missing from today's moviegoing scene.Matthau plays Miles Kendig, a CIA field agent who is benched by his new boss (Ned Beatty) for not arresting his Soviet counterpart Yaskov (Herbert Lom) when he had the opportunity.Miles hadn't arrested Yaskov for logical reasons, and rather than sit at a desk until his retirement, Miles decides to write a tell-all memoir to embarrass the CIA in general and his boss in particular. He drips the manuscript to them one chapter at a time, causing the intelligence community in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to go…

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