Popeye Popeye Paramount Home Video 1980 / color / 2:35 anamorphic 16:9 / 113 min. / Street Date June 24, 2003 / 19.99 Starring Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall, Ray Walston, Paul Dooley, Paul L. Smith, Richard Libertini, Donald Moffat, MacIntyre Dixon, Roberta Maxwell, Donovan Scott, Wesley Ivan Hurt, Peter Bray, Linda Hunt, Susan Kingsley Cinematography Giuseppe Rotunno Production Designer Wolf Kroeger Film Editors John W. Holmes, David Alan Simmons Original Music Harry Nilsson, Tom Pierson Written by Jules Feiffer from the comic strip by E.C. Segar Produced by Scott Bushnell, C.O. Erickson, Robert Evans Directed by Robert Altman
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson An expensive production for 1980, Popeye became known as so significant an artistic flop, it topped even the previous year's 1941. It was one of the first offerings on then-new cable television; I remember movie channel ads criticizing their competition by saying they ran pictures like Popeye. Even now, with the cult of Robert Altman more powerful than ever, critics and fans aren't lining up to champion this interesting, sometimes charming, but grossly under-achieving quasi-musical. It has some inspired casting, especially Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, but the rest of the show lacks a unifying concept, and wallows in Altman-esque directorial 'touches'. Auteur-wise, it's consistent, but most of the time, it's a ponderous lump of a movie. On DVD, seen for the first time in 23 years in its Panavision dimensions, it's easy to enjoy the adorable parts and let the rest of Popeye glaze over. And it's certainly too good-natured a film to actually hate ... Synopsis (spoilers, I guess): Sailor man Popeye (Robin Williams) shows up at Sweethaven looking for his long-lost father, and instead gets involved with the Oyl family when both he and Olive Oyl (Shelley Duvall) become enamored of a lost 'orfink' baby, that Popeye dubs Swee'pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt). But Swee'pea's ability to pick racetrack winners gets him kidnapped by Olive's ex-fiancee Bluto (Paul Smith) who works for the mysterious Commodore. Then Bluto also kidnaps Olive and The Commodore, who turns out to be Popeye's missing paterfamilias, Poopdeck Pappy (Ray Walston). Robert Altman has to be the screwiest choice ever to helm a big-budgeted family musical, after his one comedy smash M*A*S*H and a half-dozen quasi-comedies of the 70s. Paramount clearly wanted to horn in on Warners' franchisable Superman success, and the concept of Popeye skips over the old Max Fleischer cartoon series, back to the original E.C. Seagar comic strip. Altman was certainly a creative talent, but with his late-70s string of uncommercial, artsy flops, who would have thought that he would deliver anything different from what was finally made? Altman loves nothing better than creating an oddball little community and populating it with a large ensemble of eccentric actors. The stars and main story thread of M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller stay reasonably out front, but one gets the idea that Altman prefers to set up his little worlds, invent things to make them come to life, and let lesser considerations like stories take care of themselves. It works splendidly with a rambling scenario like California Split, but pictures like Buffalo Bill and the Indians frustrate the hell out of movie studios - the whole thing is shot freeform, with telephoto lenses from 20 yards away. Altman's idea of direction is to put his actors into a scene so big, nobody can even tell when they're on camera. The ensemble is the real star of Popeye, and that's the problem. The half-hour's worth of plot is divvied up amid two hours of literal representations of characters from the Segar comic strip - the indescribable original strip populated with an anarchic group of stange misfits wearing costumes with the same cultural origins of The Gangs of New York. Segar's Popeye strip had these bizarre types, all speaking a weird polyglot of mangled English. Few of them even say much of anything coherent, and just bounce off one another in a perpetual aggressive mode. That's the basic setup retained in Jules Feiffer's 'please-explain-this' script, that turns Sweethaven into a Kafka-like town of misery and despair populated by alienated, disfunctional citizens. And since they are played by the actors Altman loves to work with and inspire, they get most of the director's attention. Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall do amazing impersonations of the characters as we remember them from the Max Fleischer cartoons. Williams' adroit verbal skills are perfect for this kind of patter, as even when mumbling, he's perfectly audible. His Popeye mutters non-stop remarks, oaths, and gloriously mispronounced puns, but is basically a softie, taking lots of abuse before 'busking folks inna mush'. Olive is a ditzy butterfly with an overinflated sense of selfish pride, but basically a good egg. Skinny as a beanpole and awkward as a duck, she's an attractive dish and a lady - by sheer will alone. Duvall's charming take on fantasy would be further demonstrated shortly thereafter in the series of cable TV Fairy Tale Theater shows she produced. Even Swee'pea is serendipitous to the brew. Played by an Altman relative, little Wesley Ivan Hurt had a little infant muscle sydrome that causes babies to distort their faces, something they soon grow out of. Swee'pea's great reactions redeem a lot of scenes, and his interaction is as important to the film as Popeye's prosthetic 'turkey leg' forearms. All of the scenes with these three main characters are better than wonderful. Popeye and Olive Oyl have a strange adoring relationship, which is interesting because they hardly ever embrace, let alone kiss. The threesome immediately becomes a little unofficial family in the broken-down Oyl home. Unlike the new town in Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Sweethaven doesn't have a church, and Popeye and Olive's situation has an odd low-life connotation of 'living in sin', completely belied by their obvious innocence. Little snippets of Harry Nilsson songs are precious beyond words - Savant once taped them off cable to play back to his own kids, infants at the time. They basically express a yearning for the loving family that Popeye and Olive want: "I've been sailing on the seven seas / looking for some buddies who could sail with me ... sail with me / ... And I've been waiting for someone like you, a man who could love me and will promise to, stay with me ... stay with me." Taken on their own, these are wonderful moments. But overall, the music is incredibly frustrating. Stay With Me and Olive's He Needs Me are delightful little ditties, but they're like intros to real melodies that never come. Olive's He's Large makes its point and then drags on, as does the repeated Sweethaven dirge, with lyrics that go nowhere. Popeye's What Am I? in the gambling 'den of ill repukes' has some oomph, but it's really a lead-in to a main lyric line from the old Popeye the Sailor Man, the song everyone loves, that should have opened the show instead of ended it. As a musical, Popeye is a bunch of fits and starts and fragments. And that's the weird grief of Popeye - it takes two hours for a setup, and then ends without a real story getting started. Many episodes are amusing - Popeye's rumble in the cafe, the fight on the dock with Oxblood Oxheart, but they don't get very far. We're too bogged down by Donald Moffat's Taxman, and our attention is dissipated among 30 colorful but pointless characters who really have no relation to each other.  1 The story finishes with an unexciting chase to a new locale for the ending fight. The production really falls apart when our attention drifts to contemplating the complicated but unimpressive boats and sets. Shot in a much-touted Maltese outdoor studio, the sun-baked semitropical setting amid all those rocks never really comes together - the worn houses just don't look like anyone would build them where they are. It's a sort of Disneyland in Disrepair look. At the end, poor Shelley Duvall yells "Oh Popeye!" about a hundred times, there's some amusing action in the tame fisticuffs between the hero and the villain, and then it's over. Yep, it's a real mess, but I'm going to enjoy DVD's ability to replay my favorite parts of this one. Paramount's DVD of Popeye looks great, especially in its widescreen Technovision dimensions. Many shots are so wide that individual players are going to get lost on any but bigscreen televisions, I fear, but that's due to Altman's directorial choice. The 5.1 records the ditties (sounds more appropriate than songs) nicely. There are no extras, not even a trailer. It's rated PG, because Popeye says 'shit' once, and his Poopdeck Pappy, obviously asked to make it up as he goes along, runs around yelling 'haul ass' for ten minutes straight. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Popeye rates: Movie: Good - or Fair + Video: Excellent Sound: Excellent Supplements: none Packaging: Keep case Reviewed: June 20, 2003 Footnotes: 1. There are some standouts. Donovan Scott is an adorable Castor Oyl, and Paul Dooley a nice fussbudget Wimpy. Paul L. Smith is less miscast, than his Bluto poorly conceived - as a villain, he's a big nothing. The wonderful Ray Walston (Damn Yankees) would be fine, but he seems to have come in from another movie, and they've given him the worst song (or song fragment) to sing. Linda Hunt sticks out wonderfully, of course, as the tiny mum of the gargantuan Oxblood Oxheart. Return [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © MH Sub I, LLC dba Internet Brands. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use