by Alex P.
You may dimly remember that there was a Popeye live action movie in the eighties starring Robin Williams. You may have seen the box on our shelves and been amused by the cover or just remembering that it exists. The movie, like the character it adapted, seems banished to somewhere deep in our cultural unconscious, a quaint memory.
Popeye feels like a movie destined not to work. When Paramount and Disney sought to adapt the 1930s cartoon sailor for a 1980s crowd, they chose Robert Altman to direct, who was primarily known for edgy, subversive Hollywood films like M*A*S*H* and The Last Goodbye. Not only that, but they asked for him to make a musical film, and not only that, but pop musician Harry Nilsson was hired to write the songs. This seems like a series of missteps out of which no normal film could emerge, but thankfully, Robert Altman was a director who thrived on unusual circumstances.
Truly, though, the casting is kismet. Robin Williams stars in only his second-ever feature film, fresh with success playing Mork in Happy Days and Mork & Mindy. Here he dons huge prosthetic forearms and mugs constantly while performing a passable Popeye impression. Shelley Duvall was practically destined to play the gangly and shrill Olive Oyl and brings a physicality almost as good as Williams’.
The real star is the town the crew built in Malta (it still stands today!) on the side of a cliff in a small bay. The ramshackle town combined with constant slapstick gags give the town an energy that really embodies the cartoons. Altman’s style is notable for having almost constant comic dialogue in all of his films (it can only be described as “muttering”), and I found that it actually did end up resembling the cartoons. There are many direct references to visual gags from the cartoons that work surprisingly well in live-action – my favorite image is when Bluto shoves Shelley Duvall into a large deck-level pipe in a raft, and only her head is visible, the rest of her body impossibly disappears below the surface as she floats along.
The songs are by far the weakest part of the film. Each one is horribly underdeveloped, the lyrics comprise of phrases like “I’m Mean” or “He’s Large” or “Blow Me Down” and little else, except for muttering. The reason for this is that Altman chose, unlike most musical films, to record the singing on-set, so the vocals are always indistinct and seem to trail off amid the choreography and gags.
Nobody seemed to know what to make of Popeye on its release. It was modestly successful at the box office but not the big success that executives were expecting, and it left critics flummoxed, which was enough to tank director Robert Altman’s career for the next decade. I was charmed by it. I am personally a huge fan of Altman’s films and found it to be a great vehicle for his unique energy. It also a particular joy to watch the cartoon violence that ensues with Bluto and Popeye, smashing through walls and destroying furniture and eating spinach.
Popeye is available on to borrow on DVD and stream on Kanopy for free with your library card.
Alex Pyryt is an IT Systems Support Specialist at the Administrative Branch of the Howard County Library System.
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