NEGATIVES 1968

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

Vivien: “Something is going on, and I want to know what it is.”

Not only a line from the film, but a phrase I caught myself repeating several times

while watching this mesmerizingly offbeat, very ‘60s, psychosexual drama.

Negatives, a movie about three unconventional individuals in an unconventional relationship, filmed in an unconventional style, is very much a Sixties zeitgeist film. A psychedelic, counterculture product of its time, it nevertheless failed to garner much attention during its initial release. Fated to be a movie that time just seemed to pass right by. 

But time is a tricky thing, and Negatives, a refreshingly kink-positive film about erotic obsession that touches on such contemporary culture-war topics as cosplay, gender identity, aromanticism, bisexuality, cross-dressing, polyamory, and sexual fluidity—may have taken nearly 60 years to get here (never granted an official VHS or DVD release, it’s now available in restored, pristine Blu-ray), but it’s a movie whose time may have finally come. Again.

I was 11 years old in 1968, but I have no direct recollection of its original theatrical release (it opened in San Francisco in November of 1968). However, I did get the opportunity to see it sometime in the early to mid-‘70s, when Negatives was shown on a late-night TV program called “The Adults Only Movie,” broadcast by the independent Bay Area UHF station KEMO-TV (that name!...Channel 20). The program's irresistible-to-an-adolescent title was mostly a come-on, for the films screened were merely an eclectic mix of tangentially sexual foreign films and stateside exploitation flicks presented with minimal editing.    

By then a high schooler in the early throes of taking myself very seriously as a film buff, I thank “The Adults Only Movie” for introducing me to movies like Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park (1969), Elio Petri’s The Tenth Victim (1965), and those Italian anthology films that seemed to be all the rage in the '60s (Yesterday Today and Tomorrow, Bocaccio '70). And, most memorably for me, the occasional screening of homoerotic cult curios like the Helmut Berger version of Dorian Gray (1970), and Michael Cacoyannis’ The Day the Fish Came Out (1967).

Apropos of a movie in which costumes and masquerade play a significant part, Negatives opened in Los Angeles at the Granada Theater on Wednesday, October 30, 1968 - the day before Halloween.

Unfortunately, my memories of that first viewing of Negatives are as murky as the UHF reception on the tiny black-and-white TV set I watched it on in my bedroom. Mostly, what I remember is that it aired at the peak of my Glenda Jackson mania, so seeing her in something new (something that didn't require her to appear in period costuming ...sort of) was a big thrill. I also recall that, while I was quite taken with the film's abstract structure and atmosphere of arty decadence, the strongest impression Negatives left me with was that it was an enigma. I found it mystifying. Indeed, so much showy, deliberate equivocation made me think I was watching an extended, uncharacteristically horny, episode of Night Gallery. 

I didn’t see Negatives again until some 30 years later, via a blurry bootleg DVD+R copy burned from a TV broadcast ...but at least this time it was in color! And better still, by then, life experience and having read the source material—author Peter Everett (with Roger Lowry) very faithfully adapted his 1965 novel for the screenplay—made me appreciate the wisdom of art critic John Berger's contention that art changes depending on who we are when we experience it. Upon revisiting this film, what once seemed so impenetrably ambiguous about Negatives now spoke to me with an unexpected psychological perceptiveness and emotional poignance. 

" I don't know who I am sometimes."

Clearly, part of the problem with my first viewing of Negatives was that I approached it like a typical, realist narrative. It's not. In straining to ascribe naturalist coherence to a narrative that is essentially impressionistic—depicting the fragmented psychological and emotional inner lives of the characters—I failed to consider that the film's then distractingly stylized visuals (which I took for no more than trendy, youth-movie window dressing) might actually be the director's chosen cinematic vocabulary to best dramatize the film's central conflict. 

Which brings me to my second insight attained from a second viewing: I hadn't previously grasped that Negatives' central dramatic conflict takes the form of a three-pronged identity crisis. And as anyone familiar with me and my film preferences must know by now, I'm a sucker for a good identity-crisis movie. Among the films that explore the fluidity of identity, the human need for connection, and the struggle to find one's authentic self, a few of my favorites are: Performance (1970), Secret Ceremony (1968), Images (1972), 3 Women (1977), and Black Swan (2010). 

In telling its story about the sensual intersection of three lives, Negatives poses many intriguing questions (and precious few answers) about the boundaries of human self-understanding and identity. Through symbolism and metaphor, it examines how the roles we assume and disguises we wear—both literal and figurative—shape our elemental sense of self.

"Who's afraid to live without false illusions?"

Critic quotes comparing Negatives to Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? are apt but superficial. Both indeed concern themselves with couples whose dysfunctional, psychologically abusive relationships are sustained by the upholding of illusions. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. For me, Negatives has more in common with the allegorical plays of Jean Genet (specifically The Balcony and The Maids [the latter film adaptation starring Glenda Jackson]) in which characters resort to pretense and blurred-line illusions to achieve the sensation of wielding power or to vent their frustration with the insignificance of their real lives.  

Glenda Jackson as Vivien

Peter McEnery as Theo

Diane Cilento as Reingard

Negatives is an erratic, erotic drama about a young London couple—Theo and Vivien—who live a life of rudderless dissatisfaction in a flat above a cluttered-by-the-debris-of-other-people’s-lives antiquities shop owned by Theo’s dying father.

When not desultorily overseeing the shop, the pair, whose open-ended relationship appears not to be based on anything resembling love… or even like, turn disappointment and self-loathing into a kind of performance art by funneling their sexual and emotional codependency into ritualized roleplay.  

Fueled by an amorphous desire as compulsive as it is elusive, Theo and Vivien’s sex life is sustained by elaborate games of dress-up, play-acting, and the adoption of different personas. Their baffling masquerade of choice: Theo pretends to be real-life Edwardian-era wife-murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen while Vivien alternates between impersonating Crippen’s domineering wife, Belle Elmore, and his adoring mistress, Ethel Le Neve. 

Donald Pleasence and Samantha Eggar in the
 British biographical crime film "Dr. Crippen" (1963) 

An American doctor convicted and hanged in London in 1910 for the murder and dismemberment of his wife, I'd never even heard of Dr. Crippen before seeing Negatives. But recently, I did get the chance to see the 1963 British film based on the case and enjoyed it a great deal (Coral Browne is terrific as the wife). An intriguing and amusing aspect emerges in Crippen and Le Neve's efforts to elude the police, with his mistress disguising herself as his teenage son. They hope to escape England by ship, but they inadvertently draw attention to themselves as the father-and-son shipboard passengers who can't keep their hands off one another! 

  (In Negatives, Vivien baits Theo about their Crippen cosplay: "Or do you prefer it when I'm disguised as a boy?") 

"Some people refuse to be themselves. they only want to be somebody else."

Apart from a vague, half-truth statement by Theo suggesting the whole Dr. Crippen fantasy was all Vivien’s idea (to which Vivien responds with her usual sarcasm: “And Theo doesn’t like it? No, he gets nothing out of it. Nothing at all”)—just why this morbid masquerade was selected or what they get out of it is, like a great many things in this film, ambiguous. 

What is known—as Negatives introduces us to this pair at the point in their relationship when these ceremonial charades have become a rote, mutually unsatisfying routine—is that Theo and Vivien use sex to avoid emotional intimacy, not achieve it. Moreover, when not engaged in acts of play-acted passion, every word they speak to one another is fraught with acrimony and hostility.

Vivien: "Why do people force you to lie to them, I wonder?"

Billy Russell as Massinger

All is playacting for Theo. Feeling ineffectual in his life and powerless in the face of his father’s cancer, he pretends on his hospital visits that all is well health-wise and that things at the shop are better than they actually are. With Vivien unwilling to relate to him without some form of game-playing (even when they go out to the movies, she insists they pretend to be strangers flirting), the only person Theo can talk to and be himself with is the shop's avuncular upholsterer, Massinger. 

“We just sort of go along, and nothing happens. We’re in a terrible rut. I guess we’ll just have to wait for a miracle or something.”  - Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

In the Hitchcock film referenced above, a young woman (Teresa Wright), bored with the routine of her small-town life, idly wishes for the intervention of “A wonderful person to shake us all up. The one who’ll save us.” Her wish is fulfilled when her favorite uncle (Joseph Cotton) arrives, but as she gradually uncovers that he is a serial killer, her illusions are shattered. Her eyes are opened to how her family’s “boring” life of structured routine has been a mask protecting them from reality’s intrusion, creating a false sense of safety and control in a world that’s inherently chaotic, unpredictable, and dangerous.

She Likes to Watch

In her delightful memoir, Oscar-nominee Diane Cilento (Tom Jones) recounts an amusing story in which Laurence Olivier, anticipating casting her in one of his National Theater productions, went to see Negatives and, during their meeting, talked for an uncomfortably long time about how bad her wig was in the film. 

A similar thing happens in Negatives, when the delicate balance of coping mechanisms Theo and Vivien have erected around their existential ennui is disrupted by the arrival of an enigmatic photographer (and chaos agent) named Reingard. Well, saying that’s her name may be inaccurate—for when she introduces herself, she doesn’t say “My name is Reingard”; she says “You can call me Reingard.” Which, of course, is just the kind of ambiguous identity gambit that makes her the ideal “one” to shake things up by turning this duo into a trio.

Moving into the spare room above the antique shop, Reingard soon reveals herself to be every bit as kink-inclined as her landlords and wastes no time establishing herself as a kind of communal erotic catalyst—reigniting Theo’s libido while simultaneously rousing Vivien’s bisexuality. 

Theo confronts Reingard about her best friend in Rome
who just happens to look exactly like Vivien 

Where Reingard reveals herself to be most impactful, however, is in the role of psychological provocateur. Acting as a literal game-changer, she encourages Theo to abandon the dead-end, ill-fitting guise of the ineffectual Dr. Crippen in favor of one she asserts is a much better fit: German WWI flying ace Baron von Richthofen. Fascinatingly, perhaps tellingly, the options of facing reality, being oneself, or abandoning coital cosplay altogether are never really on the table. 

But dismantling illusions is risky business and comes at a high price. A price our tripartite trysters discover is more than any of them bargained for. 

When Reality Won't Do

Never discovering your true self, or knowing what it means to live one's life authentically, exacts an inestimable emotional and spiritual toll. This lends a profoundly sad edge to Negatives and its look at lives led behind masks, costumes, and borrowed identity. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

Negatives is the first feature film by Hungarian director Peter Medak (The Ruling Class -1972, The Krays -1990). Knowing this goes a long way toward explaining its impassioned audacity, solemn self-seriousness, and kid-in-a-candy-store lack of restraint in its use of arty cinematic effects. Every assured, beautifully photographed frame of Negatives (cinematographer: Ken Hoges) shows Medak to be a filmmaker with a distinct creative vision who knows exactly what he’s doing and what he's trying to say. And clearly doesn’t mind keeping that information to himself. 

Mortality and Existential Dread
Theao visits his gravely ill father (Maurice Denham) in the hospital. In Tennessee Williams' play, Sweet Bird of Youth, a character refers to sex as "The only dependable distraction." Theo distracts himself with sex as a means of keeping his fear of death at bay.

Whether they’re called fringe, experimental, or avant-garde, I’ve always been drawn to idiosyncratic films of a distinctly personal bent that explore cinema’s ability to convey subjective psychological and emotional experience visually. Since the main characters in Negatives are so sketchily drawn, less real people than a trio of anthropomorphized neuroses linked in an absurdist pas de trois of existential alienation, the intensely stylized look of Negatives—all metaphor (masquerade!), symbolism (flying!), and macro close-ups of eyes, lips, and lashing tongues—provides the internal conflicts with the dramatic dimension the characters occasionally lack. 

I Can't Get No Satisfaction
 Reingard and Vivien lose themselves in fantasy masquerade
while Theo looks to be questioning his life choices 

PERFORMANCES

That Negatives earns the distinction of being cited as future multi-Oscar winner Glenda Jackson’s first film is largely a matter of finding a marketing reason to dismiss and/or recategorize her first two screen appearances, both of which are adaptations of Royal Shakespeare Company productions directed by Peter Brook:  Marat/Sade (1967) and Tell Me Lies (1968). A movie touting "Glenda Jackson in her 3rd film role!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. 

Given my longstanding, exhaustively cataloged fanboy adoration for all things Glenda Jackson, it's hardly revelatory that I find her fiery performance the film's standout. Most would be wise to be skeptical, for I'm as objective about Glenda Jackson as I am about Julie Christie.

Jackson's forceful presence enlivens every scene, complementing via counterpoint McEnery's passive melancholy and Cilento's playful, vaguely sinister mystery. All give superb performances and gamely embrace the film's outré spirit, but it's Peter McEnery's Theo--the film's most developed character and the only one given an arc--who proves to be Negatives' emotional fulcrum. The subtly expressive actor makes Theo's inner journey something anyone who's ever had to resort to wearing masks and assuming false identities to navigate through life can relate to.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Negatives' strong suit is that it is very much a style piece with a strong visual aesthetic. I particularly liked the opening credits sequence, which consists of still images of Theo and Vivien dressing for their "game." The photos are by the popular British photographer David Steen. You can check out his iconic celebrity photos here: David Steen Archive.

 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

Negatives may be a product of its time in its appearance, but the issues on the table in its narrative--people masking their identities as a coping mechanism for feelings of alienation and dissociation--seem up-to-the-minute relevant in today's world. A world where the depressed and disconnected can live their emotional lives through the filtered, fabricated, curated-selfie personas they adopt (and hide behind) online.

A 1960s film critic (a film cynic, more likely) once observed that if you can figure it out, you can't call it an art film. I'm not fond of movies that use obfuscation as a shortcut to profundity, either, and certainly Negatives feels at times a symbolism-laden puzzle that is vexingly vague when all you’re really wanting is a straight answer to the question “What the hell is going on here?” 

But as movies today become ever more blatantly “corporate content,” committed to spelling out every little detail and placating the only half-attentive streamers with closure here and closure there, I think there's much to be said for a movie that doesn’t do all the work for you. That asks you to interpret, fill in the blanks, and arrive at your own conclusions. Ultimately, it challenges the viewer to be okay with not having all the answers, to be fine with the possibility that there are MANY answers, or to be intrigued by a film that ends and leaves you thinking and asking questions. 

It calls to mind a quote from On a Clear Day You Can See Forever  (another movie whose protagonist seeks to align their identity to the past), psychiatrist Marc Chabot tells time-tripping Daisy Gamble, “I used to be in love with answers, but since I’ve known you, I’m just as astounded by questions. Answers make you wise, questions make you human.” 

"Well, perhaps one day you’ll find a game. 

Some tremendous game. Your own game."

 

The Blu-ray release of Negatives includes commentary tracks by the film's director, Peter Medak, still with us at age 88, and its star, Peter McEnery, the last living member of the cast. I've held off on listening to them until I finish this essay. I can't wait!  

BONUS MATERIAL

Though cartoonist Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic strip characters have been around since 1950, Snoopy first began his imaginary battles with the Red Baron in October of 1965 (Peter Everett's novel was published that same year, eight months earlier). For some reason, this fantasist beagle and his adventures captured the imagination of the country (I was a big fan of the Peanuts comic strip, but Snoopy always worked my last nerve), and in the '60s, you couldn't turn around without encountering Snoopy on posters, greeting cards, T-shirts, and in song. 

The novelty single Snoopy vs. The Red Baron by The Royal Guardsmen was released in 1966

Given all this, I can only imagine a film featuring a character who assumes the identity of the real-life Red Baron, German Air Force fighter pilot Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, and fantasizes about WWI battles while sitting in his engineless Tiger Moth airplane on his roof, must have hit a little differently in 1968.

Negatives' surreal ending feels deeply serious now, but was anyone able to take it seriously then? Did they see Theo as a human Snoopy, reenacting WWI battles in his head? Did audiences giggle and shout "Curse You, Red Baron!" at the screen?

Clip from "Negatives"  (1968)

  

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2026

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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