It has been 40+ years since Robert Altman’s POPEYE first made its appearance to withering reviews but a healthy box office ($60 million on a $20 million budget) and it has been 10 years since Robin Williams left us after a brilliant career and a tragic end. With that in mind, I feel the time is right for a reevaluation as the movie’s mostly negative reception is based on a basic misperception of its intentions although that misperception is completely understandable. Audiences thought they were getting a traditional musical version of the POPEYE cartoons but what they got was completely different,
That’s because Altman, ever the iconoclast, and celebrated New York cartoonist Jules Feiffer decided to go back to the original source material which is not the cartoons but a 1920s comic strip called THIMBLE THEATRE. It was created by a cartoonist named Elzie Segar and it combined comic wordplay, some surreal touches, and social observations on the world as Segar saw it. Think of it as an early version of POGO or LI’L ABNER (you can read examples of THIMBLE THEATRE online). It took place in the fictional town of Sweerhaven and featured a host of truly eccentric characters.
The strip centered around the Oyl family. There was father Cole, mother (Ba)Nana , and their two children Castor & Olive. Other recurring characters included cafe proprietor RoughHouse, bearded shoemaker Geesil, Olive’s boyfriend Ham Gravy, town bully Bluto, and the hamburger loving moocher J. Wellington Wimpy. In 1929 Segar introduced Popeye, so called because one eye was always closed. He was a pipe smoking, belligerent sailor with bulging forearms who was always muttering asides to himself. He was meant to be temporary but became so popular that he soon took over the strip.
Robin Williams was the first choice to play Popeye because of his rapid fire, improvisational comedy style. Williams was already familiar with THIMBLE THEATRE so it was an easy matter for him to immerse himself in Segar’s absurdist world. He even had the muttering asides down pat. Likewise Shelley Duvall, an Altman regular, was his first choice for Olive Oyl. She was physically right and had a voice to match. Character actors and circus performers rounded out the cast with Broadway and TV performer Ray Walston as Popeye’s father. Burly Paul L. Smith was the ideal Bluto.
The musical score, such as it was, was written by pop artist Harry Nillson who composed a series of idiosyncratic songs that matched the characters as opposed to the tuneful melodies of a traditional musical. Altman deliberately cast actors who are not great singers as that fit with his and Feiffer’s vision perfectly. The movie’s biggest problem was that it was hard to understand what was being said thanks to Altman’s habit of overlapping dialogue. What he should have done was to have POPEYE issued with subtitles so that audiences could have easily followed it. It would have helped.
That problem has now been corrected with the home video versions and as a result the movie has grown in popularity. The recently issued Blu-ray comes with a number of special features including interviews with Robert Altman and Robin Williams which help to provide a fuller understanding of how the movie was made and what they were trying to accomplish. When I first saw POPEYE in 1980, it was a frustrating experience as it was just too difficult to follow. If that describes your experience, then try POPEYE now with these extras and you’ll get a whole lot more out of it. A unique movie experience…For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.
The Capsule Critic 