MIKE'S MURDER 1984

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion.

Falling into the category of favorite obscurities that fascinate as much as they frustrate is James Bridges’ distinctively internal neo-noir, Mike’s Murder. It fascinates because it’s one of those films that slipped through the cracks, released both too late—the ‘70s were over, small, hard-to-categorize movies were out, and ’80s blockbusters and high-concept franchises were in; and too early—personal, quirky movies made a comeback with the indie film boom of the ‘90s. It frustrates me because, as much as I absolutely love this movie, it’s one that, much like the characters in it, is haunted by its past.

Living In Rear-View in Car-Centric L.A. 

Looking back is the only way she can move forward 

My own enthusiasm for Mike's Murder stems significantly, though only partially, from being a huge fan of Debra Winger, whose nuanced, almost delicate performance—arguably one of her best—is the glue holding this melancholy thriller together. But as one of those emotionally insular, urban-set, psychologically dark films of the sort that have always appealed to me (like Midnight Cowboy, Klute, Looking for Mr. Goodbar), it can be said that Mike's Murder—figuratively speaking, anyway—already had my name all over it. 

The real mystery: Was it love or limerence? 

I first saw Mike’s Murder at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard the week it opened in March of 1984. I remember being surprised by the low turnout, considering how popular Winger was at the time. The recently released Terms of Endearment was attracting large audiences, the film for which she had received her second Best Actress Oscar nomination just a few weeks earlier. 

However, part of me wasn't surprised, because Mike’s Murder—a film completed and scheduled to be released before Terms of Endearment—had arrived at theaters under a cloud of poor word-of-mouth and almost a year’s worth of negative publicity related to its troubled production history (it was close to being shelved, the studio lost faith it, and it and more or less dumped it into theaters in an effort to ride the crest of Winger's fame wave).

 The film's title sequence shows the making of a Big Tomy's chiliburger in such mouthwatering detail that, to this day, seeing just a few seconds of it can set off chiliburger cravings that can last a week. Big Tomy's opened in 1982 and, still in operation, has become an LA landmark.

An early Mike’s Murder casualty was the scrapping of much of the original score composed by ‘80s New Wave artist Joe Jackson and replacing it with a more traditional (and superb) score by Academy Award-winning James Bond composer John Barry.

But nobody weaned on the films of Robert Altman and Joseph Losey pays any attention to bad reviews, so I forged ahead, heedless of the critics calling Mike's Murder a complete waste of time and talent. And that it may well be true, for even after cable-TV and VHS exposure, Mike's Murder never really found an audience. But I fell in love with Mike's Murder from the word go. I was completely won over by everything about it. 

As yet another moody rumination on my time-honored, favorite movie theme: the innate human desire to find connection—Mike’s Murder resonated strongly as a lens held up to the urban “fear of being alone” phenomenon that leads people to settle for what's available rather than going without or asking for what they truly want. But for a movie with such an assertively '80s vibe, Mike’s Murder genuinely felt like a film made during my favorite, most experimentally exciting period in moviemaking—the New Hollywood Era of the late '60s- ’70s. 

Debra Winger as Betty Parrish

Mark Keyloun as Mike Chuhutsky

Paul Winfield as Phillip Greene

Darrell Larson as Steve

Conceived as a uniquely Los Angeles “Cherchez L’homme” crime-mystery and character study told from the tentative perspective of its female protagonist, bank teller Betty Parrish, Mike’s Murder uses the detached attachments of LA hookup culture and the irrevocable undertow of violence in the Beverly Hills-Brentwood drug scene of the coked-up '80s to explore themes of isolation, ambiguous loss, unresolved grief, and reconciled loneliness in The City of “Whatever.” (A character’s answer when pressed to define the status of a relationship -- “New lover, boyfriend, whatever…?” Also, the only appropriate response when a guy like Mike says, "I’ll call. I mean it." ).

When news of James Bridges making a film titled Mike’s Murder first started appearing in the trades, I wasn’t sure whether that possessive apostrophe referred to a murder Mike commits or one he falls victim to. 

Betty Parrish has her life well organized. She has a nice job, a cute house, a cool car (a helluva cool car), caring friends and family, she dates from time to time, and owns a baby grand piano. The only kink—literally and metaphorically—in her otherwise structured life is “The C-scale out of tune,” as she calls him: Mike Chuhutsky. A puppy-dog-cute Ohio-to-Los Angeles transplant and rootless ladies’ man who gets by on occasion. As in, occasionally giving tennis lessons, occasionally dealing drugs, occasionally telling the truth, and occasionally being the live-in, transactionally bisexual object of affection of a wealthy record producer named Phillip Greene.

A character describing Mike: “He had all kinds of stories that he used on different people. He was always preparing a face for the faces that he met.”

“On occasion” is also an apt description of Betty’s dickmatized, casual-to-the-point-of-impromptu relationship with the chameleonic Mike, whose freewheeling life—no phone, no car, no steady address, and disappearances lasting up to six months—leaves their hookups overly-reliant on chance encounters or the odd booty call. 

Although mutually attracted and sharing a strong sexual chemistry, Betty and Mike are very nearly complete strangers (perhaps explaining where all that great sexual chemistry comes from). So, when one of Mike’s characteristically flaky no-shows turns out to be due to his having been brutally murdered in a botched drug deal, Betty is thrown into an emotional tailspin. Confronted with the abrupt finality of her present—all unexplored and unresolved feelings now subsumed by grief—Betty grows increasingly, and ultimately dangerously, invested in piecing together the disturbing fragments of Mike’s shrouded past to get a better handle on why this guy has made such an indelible impression on her. 

Debra Winger on Betty being sexually fixated on Mike: “She was brought up well and has a great relationship with her mother. She has a good job and does it well. But she has this other side that people may not see at first. She needs that guy every three months. She and Mike don’t light candles. It's hot stuff. It’s sweaty, fast, and sometimes rough. She doesn’t introduce Mike to her mother. “

Atmospheric, tense, and one of those movies I knew I would return to again and again to pick up details of plot and character, I remember my first thoughts after seeing Mike’s Murder were: 1) Debra Winger is astonishingly good, and 2) this movie is gay as fuck.

The innate Queerness of Mike’s Murder leapt out at me years before I even knew its producer/writer/director was gay. Mike's Murder is a labor-of-love passion project by the late two-time Oscar-nominee James Bridges (The Baby Maker, The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy) that was inspired by a tragic real-life event shared by Bridges, his life partner Jack Larson (who produced), and their friend Paul Winfield.

In fact, Winfield’s role has him cast essentially as himself—Winfield, a privately out gay man who was professionally closeted—was tasked with revisiting and reenacting what certainly must have been a very painful period in his life. James Bridges, who became somewhat of a mentor to Debra Winger after casting her in Urban Cowboy, wrote the role of Betty especially for her. 

“The Ephemeral is Eternal” 

Personal favorite Dan Shor (Wise Blood, Strange Behavior), as video performance artist Richard—he's Betty’s “whatever”—reinterprets Baudelaire’s “Extract the eternal from the ephemeral” to endorse his personal philosophy that the present is all that matters. In doing so, he inadvertently offers Betty a bit of cautionary insight: dwelling on the past and mourning the brevity of time spent with someone is futile. The duration of something's existence has no bearing on its significance, as even the most fleeting experiences have the potential to become a part of our lives forever. 

Mike's Murder's Queer aesthetic, I feel, is tethered to the film's non-traditional spin on the mystery genre and on its on-the-fringes perspective. Though critics and audiences at the time were annoyed to distraction by it, I liked that Bridges used the titular murder as a catalyst for exploring themes of urban alienation rather than a traditional mystery device. 

Cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos supports this by establishing a visual motif wherein much of Mike’s Murder is shot in confined, tightly framed close-ups that convey the sense of its characters—who speed past one other in cars, conduct business from their vehicles (Betty’s job is in one of those hermetically sealed-looking drive-in banks), communicate via phones and answering machines, and peer at one another through cameras and videotape recorders—rarely ever touch and always seem to be alone…even when they’re together. 

Barriers and Separation

The look of Mike’s Murder so fits the story at hand that it almost acts as the visual equivalent of those traditional noir voice-over narrations, drawing attention to the fact that the lens through which Bridges sees the world of Mike’s Murder is so personal that it borders on cinéma vérité. Indeed, Mike’s Murder is easily the most recognizably lived-in, truthfully-realized vision of Los Angeles in the ‘80s I’ve ever seen (rare in movies, even the driving scenes are geographically accurate!) 

This personal touch stamp extends beyond the film’s appearance, as Mike’s Murder finds Bridges—who, like Winfield, was openly gay in his private life but professionally closeted—taking his boldest step forward in integrating his personal life into his professional work. While the homoerotic gaze has long been a hidden-in-plain-sight attribute of several of James Bridges’ movies, Mike’s Murder is the first film by the director to include an entirely out gay character.

September 30, 1955 (1977)

Dennis Christopher (right) played a queer-coded supporting character in Bridges’ semi-autobiographical September 30, 1955 (the date actor James Dean died). The character that Bridges based on himself—the James Dean-obsessed Jimmy J, played by Richard Thomas—is depicted as straight. (Though a case could be made that the character is, like perhaps Bridges at that age, questioning.) 

Of all the films in Bridges’ abbreviated filmography (he made only eight movies in his career), Mike’s Murder is my absolute, hands-down favorite. And I say this knowing that the version I fell in love with isn’t the director’s original vision, but one whose tonal shifts and inconsistent, alternating points of view betray the battle scars of a year’s worth of edits, reshoots, retooling, and tinkering following a legendarily disastrous preview screening. 

Initially slated for a spring 1983 release, Mike’s Murder was sneak-previewed in January 1983 at two Bay Area theaters. Audience response was overwhelmingly negative. Bridges spent a year making changes—much of it funded personally—to address the most frequently criticized elements: the explicit violence and the nonlinear narrative. The revised Mike’s Murder premiered in Los Angeles on Friday, March 16, 1984, at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. 

It always rang false to me when Bridges, in damage-control, PR-speak interviews about the revamped Mike’s Murder, claimed, “This is a better picture than it was.

Mainly because I grew up in the Bay Area and knew that the locations chosen to preview Mike's Murder were two of the most white-bread, conservative suburban enclaves you could find. In short: the audience comprised precisely the demographic least likely to be receptive to—especially in the homophobic, Reagan '80s—a movie as artistically unorthodox and sexually transgressive as Mike’s Murder.

If Bridges hoped to salvage Mike’s Murder by restructuring it to appeal to THIS demographic, you’ll never convince me that his edits made the film "better"—only that they made it less “upsetting” to the multiplex set. The extreme form of hostility expressed at the previews (accounts cite booing, yelling, laughter, walkouts) doesn’t describe the reactions of people bored or confused by a movie. It’s how people react when they’re affronted.

Being as passionate about this film as I am, it's kind of torture to watch the
 theatrical trailer because it’s made up almost entirely of scenes no longer in the film.
Link to the TRAILER 

“Date night” preview audiences expecting another conventional thriller from the director of The China Syndrome, or hoping Winger—by now typed in the public’s eye as a romantic ingénue thanks to Urban Cowboy and An Officer and a Gentleman—to be swept off by the leading man in the final reel, must have gone into apoplexy when confronted with Mike’s Murder’s blunt Queerness (a line from the original cut had Winfield telling Winger about his first encounter with Mike, “Before I knew it, he was in my arms, and my cock was up his ass...”); unfiltered sexuality (the original version of the phone sex scene was said to have made audiences particularly uncomfortable); liberal politics (a critique of the hypocrisy of the Moral Majority); and explicit violence attached to the kind of racial “optics”  (Mike’s retribution murder is carried out by two Black men) apt to trigger both trigger white fragility and claims of racism.

Brooke Anderson as Patty

Since the reedited version of Mike’s Murder ultimately flopped as resoundingly as the original was likely to do (I think it was always going to be too personal and niche a film to ever appeal to a broad audience), it’s a shame that Bridges’ original vision, flaws and all, wasn’t what was released. 

In Mike's Murder, photographs serve as symbols of the attempt to hold onto that which is impermanent, so I have always had a soft spot for this striking, discarded poster artwork, which evokes a still from a photographer's contact sheet with a red edit mark representing Mike's bloody erasure. Fortunately, composer Joe Jackson, compelled to release his album of songs written for the soundtrack early due to the film's changing release schedule, kept the image for his album cover.

William Ostander as Randy

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of the great things about Mike’s Murder is that it doesn’t neatly fit into any specific film genre or category. Except one.

Independent of what it was intended to be, meant to express, or how it came to be perceived, looking at it now, Mike’s Murder resonates with me most persuasively and forcefully as an underappreciated work of Queer Cinema. It’s a gay art film, with —if not inauthentically, then perhaps non-essentially—a centered heteronormative perspective. Kind of like a post-Gay-Lib/AIDS-Epidemic-Era throwback to the days when queer artists (Inge, Williams, Capote), prohibited from telling their stories honestly, had to resort to filtering their truths through heterosexual surrogates—most often female characters.

"(Mike) loved having his picture taken. He was impatient
and liked to see the results immediately."

From camera angles foregrounding Mark Keyloun’s rather splendiferous butt, to the introduction of Paul Winfield’s character in a semi-nude state, and the notably extended (and welcome) screen time allocated to the half-dressed muscular physique of wannabe Chippendales dancer Randy (William Ostrander, very good and doing a lot with a mysteriously-written role), the eroticized gay gaze in Mike’s Murder feels both thematically relevant and boldly subversive in a mainstream film.

"He talked about you all the time."

Each time I watch Mike’s Murder, I’m hit over the head with the conspicuous truth that, for me, the film’s real story, most interesting relationship, and most genuine narrative arc exploring the themes of love and loss in LA, is between Mike and Phillip. 

Phillip’s entrance in the film arrives at a point when the viewer is desperately in need of a clear-eyed, unfiltered sense of who the mask-wearing Mike truly was, and the character of Phillip, middle-aged, sophisticated, and a little world-weary, provides that.

And thanks to the effortless gravitas of Paul Winfield’s performance, Betty's discovery that the one person who really knew Mike—who both knew and loved the sides of him she never saw—is a man, elevates the film’s emotional tension in a way I wanted to see more of. 

Robert Crosson as Sam Morris
A lonely photographer with a paternalistic streak
 whose affection for Mike is channeled into a voyeuristic preoccupation

When the Betty character isn’t coming across like a lone female tourist lost in an androcentric world of drug dealers, Sugar Daddies, father figures, and the opportunistically sexually-fluid young men who love and/or use them; from a strictly neo-noir angle, I do like that her character feels like a (intentional?)  genre callback to the Dana Andrews role in Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir, Laura.

In that film, a detective falls in love with the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating, and I think something like that is what happens to Betty. 

It’s left up to individual interpretation whether one thinks Betty is in love with Mike at the start of the film (my take is that she only thinks she is). The tragedy is that she only ever “meets” the real Mike after his death. At the end, when she’s at her piano and we hear that she has had that out-of-tune C-scale fixed, I think Betty has indeed fallen in love with Mike. And is slowly learning how to let him go.

No matter how many times I see it, Winger always wrings the waterworks out of me during this scene. She is SO, good. I can't imagine that the character of Betty, a completely average woman, looked like much of a role on the page, but Winger inhabits her and gives her an inner life we can see play across her face.

Even in those moments when I wish for a version of Mike's Murder that was less hetero-centric, I can never get past the personal reality that less of Winger is anything is just simply not a good idea.

NO ONE IS INNOCENT

Comparative allusions to Preminger’s Laura and Mike’s Murder don’t stop with Winger’s role, but extend most pointedly to the way the titular characters in both are these dominant figures whose presences are felt throughout the entirety of the film. Influencing the action, whether or not they are onscreen, whether or not they are alive.  

As embodied by the ideally cast Mark Keyloun, Mike Chuhutsky (I love that name. As one reviewer observed, it stands out as the last remnant of his true self; the part of himself he hadn’t yet got around to changing), like all good hustlers, has that complacently nebulous, passive/assertive, all-things-to-all-people quality that makes him the perfect blank screen upon which others can project exactly what they want and need. He can look like an innocent, he can look like a criminal.

Hustler White

“A confused kid who sold a few drugs to pay his rent.” 

Themes related to privilege and the presumption of white innocence emerge provocatively and ambiguously—vacillating somewhere between critique and perpetuation—in the “reckless boys making bad decisions” tone of the scenes showing Mike and his twitchy friend Pete (an excellent Darrell Larson) engaging in criminal activity. 

Physical contrasts—sharky city boy Pete next to cherubic Midwest cornpone Mike—invite audiences to ascribe a naïve blamelessness to Mike. Yet simultaneously, there’s a well-observed undercurrent of personal accountability proffered in the (evenhandedly accurate) depiction of Mike and Pete as the type of guys who, despite untrustworthiness, bad faith, and a tendency to exploit an advantage being characteristic of so many of their interactions with others, are nevertheless entirely uncomprehending of the fact that their actions can have consequences. 

A darkly compelling (and often heartbreaking) look at love, loss, and loneliness in the city of missed connections, Mike's Murder is a more-than-worthy addition to the canon of Los Angeles neo-noirs. It's a film that deserves reevaluation. Better still, Mike's Murder is a film that needs to have its original cut restored. 

Life partners James Bridges (who started out as an actor) and Jack Larson (associate producer of Mike's Murder and, of course, TV's Jimmy Olsen of The Adventures of Superman) met when both appeared in the film Johnny Trouble (1957). Bridges passed away in 1993, Larson in 2015

I once described Albert Finney as a movie star with the heart of a character actor. I think James Bridges was a mainstream filmmaker with the heart of a Queer Cinema auteur. And the two worlds come together magnificently in Mike’s Murder, James Bridges' most authentically personal film. 

Clip from Mike's Murder (1984)

BONUS MATERIAL

When I mentioned earlier that Debra Winger’s character drives a cool car, it’s because the moment I saw her driving that silver VW Rabbit convertible in Mike's Murder, I went ga-ga over it. My first VW Rabbit, purchased in the '90s was red, but in 2000, I got the silver model that had always obsessed me.  

I actually had the opportunity to observe James Bridges and Jack Larson at work when, about five months after seeing Mike’s Murder, I got a job as a dance extra in Bridges’ next film, Perfect (1985). Filming took place over seven days at the end of summer at the Sports Connection fitness center in West Hollywood.  

Debra Winger signed my Black Widow poster: 
"To Ken, my favorite guy to move with" 

In the mid-‘90s, I worked in Santa Monica as a dance instructor and fitness trainer, and for a brief time, I had the “someone pinch me!” thrill of having Debra Winger as a client. She relayed to me that she selected my class because she couldn’t stand “perky” (my class demeanor was not dissimilar to that of Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman). She's such a sweetheart, and I had such a crush. 

The real-life case that inspired Mike’s Murder was the stabbing death of Mark Bernolak in his apartment in Brentwood on October 12, 1980. Bernolak, a former lover of Paul Winfield and an acquaintance of Bridges and Larson, was a part-time tennis instructor who also dealt drugs while trying to get work behind the scenes in films. IMDB lists him as an assistant on the 1979 The Who documentary The Kids Are Alright, and a university archive has seven photos Bernolak took of author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy (both friends of Larson and Bridges). The details surrounding the actual case are tragic and a bit dodgy, but far less sensational than what Mike’s Murder depicts (Those interested can Google: Mark Bernolak and UCLA football). 

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2025

POPEYE 1980

“The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”  Annie - The Broadway Musical (1977)

“I am what I am an’ tha’s all that I am.”  Popeye - The Movie Musical (1980)

The eccentric (read: weird), off-the-wall, unruly nature of so many of the ‘70s movies I love is a trait I associate with the decade’s turbulent, smash-the-idols mindset that challenged societal norms through movements like the Sexual Revolution, Black Power, Women’s Liberation, and the fight for LGBTQ Rights. As anyone who lived through that decade can tell you, the ‘70s were A LOT. So, it’s also no surprise—considering the Vietnam War, Nixon, Watergate, the Energy Crisis, and a struggling economy—that another defining characteristic of ‘70s films is their pervasive sense of pessimism, disillusionment, and cynicism.

The 1970s: When No One Went to the Movies Looking for a Good Time

But even pressure cookers have their limits, and by mid-decade, after years of near-unrelenting sturm and drang, a kind of mass battle fatigue had begun to set in. The result: like trauma survivors reverting to age-regression as a coping mechanism, the nation’s moviegoers started turning away from post-Watergate nihilism and began flocking (in precedent-setting droves) to reassuring, old-fashioned, almost juvenile entertainments like Jaws (1975), Rocky (1976), Grease (1978), Superman: The Movie (1979), and the unabashedly hopeful, “look to the skies” optimism of Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

The overwhelming dominance of these films at the box office ushered in the age of the blockbuster, the revival of the movie musical, and signaled the end of the New Hollywood reign of director-as-self-indulgent-auteur (Heaven’s Gate was detonated in November 1980). By decade’s end, it was confirmed: uplift and escapism were in, reflection and navel-gazing were out. 

Some were quick to label this sociocultural shift an avoidance tactic—a deliberate retreat into the past to escape the instability of the present and the uncertainty of the future. But it’s clear, at least on some level, that it was also an act of retrieval. A retracing of our steps to find out where, on the ‘70s road to America shedding its illusions about itself, we’d also lost the capacity for hope, optimism, and trust.

To discover, as David Bowie sang in his 1975 song, "Young Americans": “Where have all Papa’s heroes gone?”

We Could Be Heroes

This late-decade surge of pop-cultural positivity found an anthem and hero in the 1977 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Annie. Based on the 1924 Harold Gray comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, the show and its signature song “Tomorrow” – an unironic paean to optimism – caught the eyes and ears of Paramount producer Robert Evans. Formerly the head of Paramount, Evans was now an independent  ever on the lookout for another anticipating-the-zeitgeist hit like his 1971 studio-saving smash Love Story. Sensing the shifting tide in audience tastes, Evans hoped to make Annie into a film, but was beaten to the punch by Ray Stark of Columbia Pictures (and we all know how that turned out). 

Undeterred, Evans raided Paramount’s vaults and, in no time, announced plans to mount a live-action movie musical around cartoonist E.C. Segar’s 1929 comic strip character Popeye the Sailor (Man). A rather canny choice on Evans’ part, for not only did Popeye have global familiarity and name recognition, but in Popeye’s catchline: “I yam what I yam (an’ tha’s all I yam),” Evans had landed upon the perfect ideological hook—individualism, self-acceptance, and being true to oneself—upon which to anchor the entire film (and to inspire, he hoped, a suitably “Tomorrow”-like optimistic musical anthem).

Popeye and King Blozo in E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater comic strip

Preproduction on Evans’ passion project got promisingly underway with the usual revolving door of actors (Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Gilda Radner, Jason Robards [for Poopdeck Pappy]) and directors (Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Louis Malle) considered. 

But industry eyebrows were raised to the snapping point when it was learned that one of Hollywood’s most notoriously hands-on, old-school movie producers had selected as the creative team for his broad-appeal, family musical comedy based on a comic strip, not one but THREE of the industry’s most creative but notoriously rebellious, independent-minded, and artistically temperamental substance abusers: Jules Feiffer (Screenplay), Harry Nilsson (musical score), and Robert Altman (director). 

Poised to be Paramount's big holiday season release of 1980, Popeye arrived—over budget, behind schedule, and amid reams of negative press about its troubled production—on Friday, December 12, 1980, at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. 

Robin Williams as Popeye the Sailor Man

Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl

Wesley Ivan Hurt as Swee'pea

Paul L. Smith as Bluto

Paul Dooley as J. Wellington Wimpy

Ray Walston as Poopdeck Pappy

As was my wont back then, on Popeye’s opening day, I was among the first to arrive in the long line of keyed-up ticketholders that serpentined down Hollywood Boulevard from the Chinese Theater forecourt. The overall atmosphere felt like being at an “event," and the early bird section I was in seemed to be made up entirely of Robin Williams/Mork and Mindy fans who were completely unaware of Robert Altman, but were eager as all get-out to see Williams in his film debut. 

In fact, for fear of instigating a real-life reenactment of the last scene from The Day of The Locust, I found myself lying to my line-mates—the strangers one bonds with while waiting in a movie line for two hours—that I, too, was a fan of Williams (I wasn’t…at least not back then) and loved Mork and Mindy (a show I seriously could not stand).

Popeye and his Pappy
Mork meets My Favorite Martian 

However, as a fan of Robert Altman since my high school days, everything about Popeye represented such a departure for the director that I was practically chomping at the bit with anticipation, wondering what the “strange bedfellows” partnership of Altman & Evans would yield. By reputation, Evans seemed to be precisely the kind of profits-driven producer Altman had railed against his entire career, just as it was also clear that, from a professional standpoint, Altman was in no position to stand on principle.

  Popeye was Altman’s third film released that year--the ice-age thriller Quintet was a flop, and the ensemble comedy H.E.A.L.T.H. was shelved after a brief, poorly-received L.A. run. Popeye represented #3 in a three-strikes-you’re-out comeback bid for Altman’s return to the kind of mainstream success that had eluded him since Nashville (1975).

Duvall's letter-perfect Olive Oyl deserved an Oscar nomination,
but Popeye was overlooked entirely at Awards Season.

Popeye was Shelley Duvall's 7th collaboration with Robert Altman. Earlier that year (May, 1980) saw the release of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, marking Duvall's first significant role in a film by another director (she had a brief but amusing bit as a Rolling Stone reporter in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, 1977).

Donald Moffat as The Tax Man

As an end-of-the-year release, Popeye, through no fault of its own, arrived shouldering all the anxieties of the industry’s disappointments of the previous months. The summer of 1980 had seen a spate of expensive musicals flop stupendously (Can’t Stop the Music, Xanadu, The Apple), indicating that, despite Grease's success, the movie musical might not truly be “back” after all; the boxoffice underperformance of the comic-book-based Flash Gordon (playing next-door to Popeye in the Chinese Theater’s add-on twin cinemas) had producers biting their nails; and just three weeks earlier, the megaton detonation of Michael Cimino’s $44 million Heaven’s Gate had symbolically signaled the end of the New Hollywood era of directors as free-rein auteurs. 

And we haven't even gotten to Popeye's own issues yet. As mentioned earlier, Popeye's release was dogged by negative press. Most of it focused on the film's troubled production history: filmed in Malta on an initial budget of $12 million, reports of inclement weather, stormy personalities (Altman, Feiffer, and Nilsson clashed throughout), and technical problems, led to rumors of Popeye running over schedule and hemorrhaging money like bilge water; its final cost, more than twice the original budget. 

But a good deal more press coverage was reserved for the grossly inopportune timing of Popeye's publicity-hound producer (Evans, of course) being charged with cocaine possession and trafficking just months before his family-friendly Disney-Paramount co-venture was set to hit theaters. 

So, instead of embarking on a self-aggrandizing Popeye promotional tour, Evans was busy dodging the press and worrying about serving jail time. Meanwhile, Paramount and Disney, who should have been pulling out all the PR stops, were in freakout damage control mode over having the name of their Christmas family blockbuster linked with the word "cocaine" in newspapers across the country, and actively engaged in publicly distancing themselves from Evans (Paramount sent out a press release reminding folks that Robert Evans was NOT a Paramount employee, but a loose-cannon freelancer).

I, for one, wasn’t worried about all the bad press. In fact, if I’m being honest, the very real possibility that Popeye could turn out to be an epic disaster factored positively in my opening day excitement. As a longtime aficionado of Cinema de Merde, I ignobly admit that rarer and more exciting than being among the first to see a future movie classic is the opportunity to be one of the first to see a genuine, history-making stinker…a bomb on the scale of something that provides “I was there!” stories to dine out on for decades to come. 

Popeye, like Superman: The Movie (1979)—Warner’s comic-book-to-screen hit whose success Paramount aspired to emulate—is an origin story. It introduces the mononymous seafaring loner (prolonged solitude accounting for his habit of talking to himself in muttered, sarcastic asides) as a storm blows him into the seaside shantytown of Sweethaven, where he hopes to find his long-lost Pappy. 

As Altman described it, his Popeye is the story of a human sailor who shipwrecks in a cartoon town and finds himself in a kind of two-dimensional limbo. The longer he stays amongst these eccentric cartoon characters, the more he begins to resemble them. In finally finding a place where he belongs, the sailor gradually transforms until "He becomes the Popeye of the cartoon.” In the film’s finale, after vanquishing Sweethaven’s dictator, gaining self-acceptance ("I am what I am"), and discovering the joys of family—both found and biological—the heroic, spinach-loving Popeye of the 1930s Max Fleischer cartoons is born. Hence, the introduction and sole appearance of Samuel Lerner’s iconic “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man” theme song.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Well, blow me down…

I’ll be darned if Robert Altman didn’t go and make the most charming, sweet-natured movie of his career. Quirky and whimsical, Popeye bears the stamp of Altman's influence in ways both beneficial (he's a wonderful ensemble director) and detrimental (the film is almost recklessly singular in its vision). However, as a true collaborative work of many talented individuals, both in front of and behind the cameras (production design: Wolf Kroeger, costumes: Scott Bushnell, cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno), what is achieved with Popeye—at least in terms of faithful visual representation—is nothing short of dazzling. The characters are brought to life in a colorful (if not always vivid) manner, effectively crafting a cohesive, fully realized, live-action cartoon world that's true to the visual and tonal spirit of the original E.C. Segar comics.

So, why didn’t I like it more? 

Bluto sees red when Olive shows up late to their 
 engagement party with another man...and a baby!

A movie this good-natured and with its heart in the right place is difficult to thoroughly dislike; yet, I can’t say I entirely fell in love with Popeye, either. Instead, my feelings align with this quote from LA Times critic Charles Champlin: “[Popeye] … is a film that is rarely uninteresting but seldom entirely satisfying, except when young Wesley [Swee’pea] is beaming his radiant innocence on all about him or when Shelley Duvall is being Olive Oyl to absolute high-voiced perfection.”    

The Toughs
Actor Dennis Franz is visible 2nd from the right.
The other Toughs are members of Popeye's production crew 

I can only guess that the audience I watched it with felt something similar because the response throughout the evening was attentive but mild. The film's biggest laugh came from a growling fox fur, and the most vocal reactions happened every time there was a close-up of Swee'pea.

Absolutely nothing is lacking in the film’s production values or anything related to the visual transfer of the Popeye comic world to the screen, which is part of the problem. In focusing so heavily on getting the neo-realist, material aspects of Popeye right, I think Altman & Co. missed the boat by not investing at least as much meticulous attention to figuring out how to make us care about these characters.

The world created is so richly textured, the look of the characters so striking in their eccentricity, I couldn’t help feeling they all deserved a better story, better music, and certainly better jokes than the ones they’re given.

A sure bet for Popeye's all-around crowd pleaser was literal nepo-baby

(the director's grandson) Wesley Ivan Hurt 

"Keep A-Goin' " (the title of one of Haven Hamilton's songs in Nashville) is the name of one of the horses considered when Wimpy takes the "clairvoyink orphink" Swee'pea to bet on the races

As a comedy, Popeye’s gently absurdist tone elicited more smiles than outright laughs from me. And as a musical, I thought it had some truly sublime moments—I adore Olive’s “He Needs Me” and Popeye singing “Swee’pea’s Lullaby”—but I remember waiting for the magic to kick in. It never really did.

I’m grateful Popeye never succumbed to the kind of deadening, forced exuberance and “bigger is better” bombast that sounds the death knell for so many big-budget movie musicals. But what’s served up in its stead (a lot of inert slapstick and surprisingly joyless, curiously earth-bound circus tumbling) is bewildering. It’s not like the world of Popeye didn’t offer Altman plenty to work with…even with that consciously crackpot musical score of Nilsson's.

The Walfleur Sisters
Played by the a cappella quartet The Steinettes, who appeared in Altman's H.E.A.L.T.H.

It has been said of Altman that his dedication to his creative vision tends to make him a director who can be indifferent to the audience’s experience and enjoyment. Aspects of Popeye bear this out. For instance, conceptually speaking, it’s all well and good to decide, since they’re simple townsfolk, no one in Sweethaven should know how to sing or dance. But since it was SOMEBODY’s idea to make Popeye a musical, didn’t it occur to anyone to consider what the audience is being asked to sit through? The concept proves far more fanciful than the reality when parts of Popeye inspire the same squirmy discomfort among viewers as those scenes of tone-deaf Sueleen Gay singing in Nashville.

Olive and the Oyls
Olive's Miss Bossypants posture clearly shows the family’s power dynamics.

And why wasn’t all of this more fun? One reason musicals ARE musicals is their potential for emotional transcendence. A musical can be as small, subtle, and offbeat as it wants to be…but that shouldn't mean it can't also be a little joyous and magical. Though “Swee’pea’s Lullaby” always gives me waterworks (which I credit to Robin Williams' endearing performance), Popeye is unique in being one of the rare musicals not to provide me with at least one good “goosebump moment.” 

There's enough that Popeye does right for me to see it as a triumph of adaptation (and if you’ve seen the live-action versions of The Flintstones, The Cat in the Hat, or How the Grinch Stole Christmas, you know how truly dreadful Popeye could have been), but it's more a movie I'm fond of than a movie I love. 

As much as I still feel Popeye never quite gelled into the movie it had the potential to be, with each passing year, I become more appreciative of its eccentricity. Especially when taking into account it was made at a time when the film industry was starting to embrace the kind of cookie-cutter, copycat mediocrity that guaranteed blockbuster multiplex weekends.

It turns out there was real wisdom in Evans’ gamble on Feiffer, Altman, and Nilsson, and in his belief that a movie emphasizing the virtues of individuality should be created by artists who embody those qualities. Altman is a risk-taker, and in his way, a humanist visionary who fought to do right by Popeye by doing it HIS way. 

It's in this way that Popeye feels very much a product of the post-‘70s zeitgeist of optimism and hope. And as an adult-friendly flick geared towards kids, I love that it champions self-acceptance and the nobility of heroism rather than—like the blockbuster Grease—the triumph of conformity and the safety of buckling to peer pressure. 

Spinach Power Couple

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall are the ideal Popeye and Olive. Both are cute as a button and impossibly young here, and since their deaths, their effortless chemistry has taken on a nostalgic poignance. Williams subdued is my kind of Williams, and his Popeye is appealingly naïve and decent. Duvall, doing wonders with her voice, gawky grace, and extravagant eyelids, gives Olive Oyl a comic-lyrical beauty resulting in her being the very best thing in the film. I don’t think Popeye would have worked at all without Duvall in, as Altman put it, “The role she was born to play.”

Although the character of Poopdeck Pappy doesn't make a lot of sense--he's a redeemed villain whose villainy served him no real purpose--Ray Walston is perfect, and this is one of my favorite scenes

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Popeye shares several amusing similarities with Robert Altman’s revisionist Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Both are set in small, makeshift settlements built specifically for the films. Both tell stories about loners whose fates are tied to an indifferent town. Shelley Duvall appears in “McCabe,” as does Robert Fortier (Edgar in 3 Women ), who plays the town drunk we see dancing on the ice. In Popeye, Fortier wears the exact same costume in his role as Sweethaven's drunk, Barnacle Bill.

The church in "McCabe" inspired Sweethaven's house of worship, while, in Popeye's wittiest allusion, a woman in an opium haze can be seen staring at a ceramic vase in the "House of ill repukes" that Popeye enters to save Swee'pea.

And both Popeye and "McCabe" are subtle anti-fascism parables. Citing a lyric from the Sweethaven anthem " We're people from the sea, free from democracy," Altman stated: “The thing we're doing in 'Popeye' is showing a microcosm of an oppressed society. The people of Sweethaven are not what they are, they are what people tell them to be.” As one journalist noted, until Popeye stands up to the tax man, the citizens of Sweethaven are happily oblivious to their entrapment and oppression. 

Sounds familiar.

BONUS MATERIAL

THINGS DON'T ALWAYS GO BETTER WITH COKE

The above wheatpaste poster ad for WHITE HORSE hair cream is likely an in-joke added by one of Popeye's craftspersons, poking fun at (or paying homage to) the abundant drug use during filming on Popeye's remote Malta location. In speaking of the shoot, Robin Williams claimed, "We were on everything but rollerskates." While Robert Altman conceded, "There was a lot of cocaine and a lot of drugs going around. Everybody was shipping stuff in."

I won't go into it here, but you're interested in knowing more, just Google: Popeye 1980 Cocaine—the internet is seriously flooded with info about the Maltese Snowstorm.

Clip from "Popeye" - 1980

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