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, rebellious spirit that characterizes much of what I love about ‘70s movies 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 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, introspection 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, who, ever on the lookout for another anticipating-the-zeitgeist hit like 1971's Love Story, had hoped to make it into a film, but was beaten to the punch by Ray Stark at 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 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, yet it was also clear that from a professional standpoint, Altman was in no position to stand on principle. As Altman’s third release of 1980 (Quintet was a flop, H.E.A.L.T.H was shelved after a brief 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. May of 1980 saw the release of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, marking her first major role in a film by another director (she had a brief but amusing part 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 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. 

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 the 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 Wallfleur 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 as those scenes of tone-deaf Sueleen Gay singing in Nashville.

Olive and the Oyls

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), it's the rare musical that fails 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 uniqueness and 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 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. Popeye is very much a product of the post-‘70s zeitgeist of optimism and hope, and as an adult-friendly flick geared to 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. 

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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