Guilty Pleasures: Popeye
Filed under: Comedy, Music & Musicals, Disney, Paramount, Fandom, Guilty Pleasures
Tell someone you love Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and you'll probably have a pleasant movie-geek conversation that's entirely bereft of finger-pointing, muffled chuckles, and slack-jawed silence. If, on the other hand you tell someone you love, say, Robert Altman's Popeye, you better be prepared to step up, argue your points, and maintain a strong sense of humor. Know what? Better yet, just keep it to yourself. Let the fact that you dig Popeye be your own little secret.Because I'm foolish enough to admit my weakness print, I can guarantee that the opinions found here in the latest edition of Cinematical's Guilty Pleasures will net me several comments in which I'm called a dork, a few emails in which I'm called a fool, and perhaps an entire website devoted to how someone who legitimately enjoys Robert Altman's Popeye should never be allowed to make a living writing about film and would probably be better suited to a career in municipal sewage.
But nyeah. I dig it! And I know some of you definitely agree with me, but I'll understand if you prefer to remain anonymous on this one...
- The music! Harry Nilsson's strangely sweet, intermittently toe-tappin', and undeniably WEIRD ditties pepper this flick like so many lunatic jimmies on a truly wacky cupcake. From Olive Oyl's outlandish ode to Bluto's, um, largeness to Poopdeck Pappy's repeated claims that he am what he am, there's a whole lot of good childish fun to be had here. Heck, Paul Thomas Anderson is right there with me; he featured the insane He Needs Me rather prominently in Punch-Drunk Love! OK, some of the songs are uncomfortable clunkers, but they never seem to bother me all that much.
- The cast! Paul Dooley IS Wimpy! Paul L. Smith makes for a perfect Bluto. And if ever there was one perfect piece of comics-to-live-action casting, it'd have to be Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl. Now, I know Robin Williams has taken a lot of flak for his Popeye over the years ... but why? He's got the pipe, the hat, the under-breath mutterisms, the attitude, the spinach ... and those hilariously bulbous arms! What's a guy gotta do? One (and by "one," I mean "I") suspects that Robin got a raw deal on Popeye, simply because he wasn't doing the ol' Mork schtick that everyone expected to see in 1980. Oh, and the background is an absolute salad bar of character actor goodness: Linda Hunt, Ray Walston, Donald Moffat, Richard Libertini, Donovan Scott, Bill Irwin ... and extra points to anyone who can spot Dennis Franz in Sweethaven.
- The Kid! Wesley Ivan Hurt as Swee'pea: Robert Altman's grandson and one of the cutest movie babies ever. Plus he could whistle and predict horse-race winners!
- The Look! Production designer Wolf Kroeger turned the Maltese seaside into one of the most lovably off-kilter and bizarrely misshapen locations ever built. (And, get this, the sets still remain in Malta!) Even before I knew when 'production design' meant, I would watch Popeye and think "Wow, those buildings and signs and costumes sure ... look ... neato."
- Subversion! On the surface Popeye works just dandily as a kid flick, provided your kids have a strange sense of humor and half an attention span, but there's another side to the movie that's just a little bit ... askew. I don't want to call it "dark," necessarily, but it's pretty evident that Altman was trying to mix things up for the kids, the adults, and the stoners, too.
- Plus, and this I'll argue till the cows come home: Popeye is, if you watch the flick with an unbiased eye and an open mind, one of the most "faithful" comic strip adaptations out there. (The comic strips, not the cartoons!) It somehow brings all the established characters together, creates just enough of a story framework for them to hang upon, and then delves into the well-known mythos and doles out a few surprises, too! (Did YOU know that Popeye originally HATED spinach? Yep.)
Oh, and let's demolish one long-standing fallacy right here. Call it junk if you like, but Popeye was NOT a bomb in any way, shape, or form. The thing cost about $20 million, made over $45 million at the U.S. box office, and has since gone on to become a long-standing cult favorite among the video crowd. (Heck, even good ol' Roger Ebert gave the flick 3.5 stars!) True, Paramount and Disney (yes, Popeye was a co-production) were almost certainly hoping for a bigger payday from Popeye, but the flick was cutting a profit long before most of the Cinematical readership was even born. (God, I'm old.)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-14-2006 @ 4:44PM
Christopher Campbell said...
Not only do I love Popeye, but I was about to claim the film for my own Guilty Pleasure post when I saw that you beat me to it!
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6-14-2006 @ 8:09PM
Abbibi said...
Ah, Popeye! I spent my childhood switching between my Popeye, Muppet Movie, and He-Man laserdiscs.
...Wow, I have quite a refined taste...
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6-14-2006 @ 8:18PM
ele©ctro said...
Popeye definitely doesn't get the props it deserves. The whole movie is so surreal...it just sort of occupies its own time and space. And yes, Swee'pea is one of the cutest movie babies of all time!
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6-14-2006 @ 10:42PM
elzey said...
i have foisted this film onto the unsuspecting for as long as it's been out and have felt no guilt in the process -- despite all attempts to shame me otherwise. and something else to chew on: i've always felt that, along with all the other goodness previously mentioned, "popeye" was altman's satire on himself. a little bit "nashville" a little bit "long goodbye" and just a touch of "m*a*s*h" on sets salvaged from "mccabe and mrs. miller". all hail pothead bob!
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6-14-2006 @ 11:02PM
George Myers, Jr. said...
Tonight PBS showed "Great Performances: Bill Irwin, Clown Prince" (which with NPR the jakes in the houses in D.C. are trying to kill again) with some commentary from "Popeye" Robin Williams and I too when I came to this must confess I really enjoyed "Popeye" the film. I almost sailed out on a Canada seiner "Casino Royale" (there was some trouble at General Motors on the assembly line when they made the engine the boat was built around, get out the chainsaw and cut a hole in the new deck, them's filings in the crankcase) and "Popeye" was like a salve, a poultice, a swing-in' a cat in a cemetery with half a bean on a wart remover and that Olive, she's was swell in it too.
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6-14-2006 @ 11:35PM
jim said...
oh, man- i'd completely forgotten about "He's Large". the boat chase music at the end is still stuck on a permanent loop somewhere in my head.
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6-15-2006 @ 6:25PM
matt breeden said...
I have thought for a long time and argued often and passionately that Popeye is quite litterally the single most underrated movie ever made. Its absolutely great, and its a failure of canonical imagination that everyone doesn't know that. It's rare that we get to see something this imaginative on screen.
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6-17-2006 @ 12:41PM
Scott said...
I remember seeing this in the theatre as a kid and thinking that it was quite an oddity, but hardly the disaster that most people claimed it to be. I'll have to check it out again and see if I feel the same way 25 years later.
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6-20-2006 @ 12:21AM
John said...
And I thought I was the only one! I watch it at least several times a month. The music is classic, if only it was on CD. Oh by the way Dennis Franz is one the bullies who knock over Popeye walking out of the Oyl's house in the begining and then gets into a fight at the restaurant later.
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8-09-2006 @ 4:38PM
Trevor Stenson said...
Both my wife and I love Popeye and I know many others that do as well. Some have made fun of the end sequence as being too 'cartoonish'. Huh? I thought that was the whole point of the cinematography. I also always thought Robin Williams' performance was spot on. The most disapointing thing was how Robin Williams turned on his own performance, making fun of it after it was panned by most every critic.
TS
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