Doggone it, I am tired of all the Popeye slander

Sweethaven is my hill, and I will gladly die on it.

The A.V. Club, once the source for some of the best, most influential film writing of the new millennium and now lost to the same “pivot to video and listicles” nonsense plaguing other pop culture websites, recently ran a list of critically acclaimed directors’ worst films. Besides the fact that it’s lazy (The Happening as M. Night Shyamalan’s worst movie), unfair (Piranha II as James Cameron’s worst movie when it’s his first movie), and just plain wrong (Hook as Spielberg’s worst when prints of 1941 exist), it makes the very disheartening, tiresome argument that Robert Altman’s Popeye is a bad movie.

Now, to be fair, saying Popeye is Altman’s worst movie isn’t exactly the same as saying it’s a bad movie. While not always financially successful (particularly not during the period when Popeye came out, though it wasn’t his least successful film), Altman’s filmography is impressively consistent, and holds up in an era where the most popular kind of film writing currently is “I watched this old movie and oh boy does it not age well.” However, the mere mention of Popeye brings out a sort of unreasonable rage in some people at its very existence. It pulls a barely fresh 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranks even lowers on Letterboxd. Those who hate it take it personally, describing it as “grotesque,” “ugly,” and “charmless,” where not even a song about how great food is can save it.

I am here to tell you: I love Popeye. It’s a top 10 musical¹ for me. I saw it as a wee child of eight when it was in theatrical release, enjoyed it then, and I’ve only come to enjoy it more as I grow older. After Robin Williams died, it was the first of his movies I watched, and cried through the whole thing. When I went to a screening of it a few years ago and the host made some kind of snarky bullshit remark about how bad it was, I booed. I really, genuinely, unironically love it².

Despite having the cocaine-dusted fingerprints of Robert Evans on it, not to mention the chaos and ego-clashing behind the scenes, Popeye is a sweet and charmingly quirky movie. Altman, working with a rewritten several times script by Jules Feiffer, made some capital-C Choices, particularly in its production design and casting. While Evans had envisioned a minimalist approach similar to the comic strip, Altman went with something much closer to the cartoon, bringing the seaside village of Sweethaven to vivid, often downright weird life.

Not until Dick Tracy a decade later would real-life depictions of cartoon effects be so equal parts off-putting and fascinating to watch³. Whether it’s Castor Oyl’s Looney Tunes-style forehead lump, Popeye’s hyperinflated forearms, or Bluto squashing a man into his shoes, there’s an almost uncanny valley effect to the whole thing. None of it would work if it wasn’t for some of the most inspired casting this side of Mark Wahlberg being cast as a good-looking idiot in Boogie Nights.

Replacing, bafflingly, Dustin Hoffman⁴, was Robin Williams, in his first leading film role⁵. After Lily Tomlin and Gilda Radner, both of whom would have been merely fine, turned the part down, Shelley Duvall was cast as Olive Oyl, a role she seemed designed in a petri dish specifically to play. Together, they might be the most perfectly cast characters in the comic book movie genre overall. Duvall in particular is a wonder, relying on her voice and long, spindly body rather than prosthetics to give life to a lovingly silly spin on the “damsel in distress” role.

It’s not just them, however. It’s Paul L. Smith, who would later appear in the exploitation slasher Pieces and as the Beast Rabban in David Lynch’s take on Dune, as a snorting, barely verbal (except when he’s bursting into song) Bluto. It’s Paul Dooley as the genial freeloader Wimpy. It’s Ray Walston as Poopdeck Pappy, Popeye’s long-lost father. It’s such familiar faces as Donald Moffat, Bill Irwin, Linda Hunt, and Dennis Franz as various residents of Sweethaven. If Feiffer’s script is a little uneven, it’s more than compensated by the care Altman and his team put into making Sweethaven feel like a real, lived-in, albeit very strange place.

One of the complaints in the AV Club article is that it’s difficult to understand Williams’ dialogue, which suggests that the writer’s familiarity with Popeye as a character begins and ends solely with this movie. No one can understand what Popeye is saying (save for Poopdeck Pappy who talks just like him), that’s the joke. His incomprehensible muttering and grumbling are true to the character, and result in one of the funniest scenes in the movie, when Popeye and Poopdeck Pappy, after years apart, clumsily reunite, and immediately revert to exasperated parent and stubborn baby roles.

While maybe not a non-stop joke machine, there are several moments of truly inspired humor in Popeye, such as Bluto literally seeing red when he catches Popeye and Olive Oyl together (rather than using a red filter, the color of everything in the shot, including the actors’ clothes, is momentarily changed to red). There’s also the great sight gag of Popeye and Poopdeck Pappy carrying framed photos of each other that turn out to be just pieces of crumpled paper with “Me Pap” and “Me Son” written on them. It’s old-fashioned cartoon silliness, in keeping with a movie adapted from a comic strip created in 1929.

If Popeye stumbles anywhere, it’s in the original songs composed by Harry Nilsson. That’s not to say they’re bad, not at all - in fact some of them are quite charming, such as Olive Oyl’s solo “He Needs Me,” a slightly tweaked version of which was used years later to marvelous effect in Punch-Drunk Love. They’re just not terribly catchy, and opening the movie with the almost dirge-like “Sweethaven Anthem” was a puzzling choice. But it’s also one more thing that makes it a unique experience, and one that grows on you over the years⁶.

More than anything else, Popeye stands as an oasis of eccentricity in a genre so doggedly devoted to fan service that much of it is staid and boring. It’s not the platonic ideal of a comic book movie (that would be the original Superman), but it’s the platonic ideal of trying something a little different with the material, an ambitious attempt to see how much of this odd little world could be made real for a little while. Maybe not all of it works, but the fact that it exists is remarkable enough.

(NOTE: if you’re rolling up your sleeves and cracking your knuckles in preparation to fire off a screed about why you don’t like Popeye, might I suggest you get your own newsletter and write about it there instead)

1. Yes, that means I hold it in the same high esteem as Cabaret and All That Jazz. Don’t mess with me, man, I’m fucking crazy.

2. One of my personal bucket list items is to travel to Malta to see the island where Popeye was filmed, which still has all the sets and is now a tourist attraction. While I was disappointed to discover that it’s just a bunch of buildings, and not an immersive Wizarding World of Harry Potter experience where you can interact with people dressed like the characters and perhaps go up to a counter and eat a hamburger gladly paid for on Tuesday, I still want to see it anyway.

3. It probably goes without saying that this ambitious weirdness is very much part of the charm for me. If you’re going to make a Popeye movie, you better damn well give Popeye a pair of lumpy, Toxic Avenger-style arms, or don’t bother.

4. It’s a real challenge to decide which is harder to picture, Dustin Hoffman playing Popeye, or Dustin Hoffman playing Rick Deckard, another unlikely thing that almost happened.

5. Williams’ first film appearance was a small part in something called Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses?, a movie I refuse to believe anyone has ever actually seen.

6. Unless you’re Leonard Maltin, who absolutely hated Popeye and clearly has no joy in his heart.