One of Robert Altman’s trademarks is the way he creates whole
new worlds in his movies — worlds where we somehow don’t believe that life
ends at the edge of the screen, worlds in which the main characters are
surrounded by other people plunging ahead at the business of living. That gift
for populating new places is one of the richest treasures in
“Popeye,” Altman’s musical comedy. He takes one of the most
artificial and limiting of art forms — the comic strip — and raises it to the
level of high comedy and high spirits.
And
yet “Popeye” nevertheless remains true to its origin on the comic
page, and in those classic cartoons by Max Fleischer. A review of this film
almost has to start with the work of Wolf Kroeger, the production designer, who
created an astonishingly detailed and rich set on the movie’s Malta locations.
Most of the action takes place in a ramshackle fishing hamlet —
“Sweethaven” — where the streets run at crazy angles up the
hillsides, and the rooming houses and saloons lean together dangerously.
Sweethaven
has been populated by actors who look, or are made to look, so much like their
funny-page originals that it’s hardly even jarring that they’re not cartoons.
Audiences immediately notice the immense forearms on Robin Williams, who plays
Popeye; they’re big, brawny, and completely convincing. But so is Williams’s
perpetual squint and his lopsided smile. Shelley Duvall, the star of so many
other Altman films, is perfect here as Olive Oyl, the role she was born to
play. She brings to Olive a certain … dignity, you might say. She’s not
lightly scorned, and although she may tear apart a room in an unsuccessful
attempt to open the curtains, she is fearless in the face of her terrifying fiancé,
Bluto. The list continues: Paul Smith (the torturer in “Midnight Express“)
looks ferociously Bluto-like, and Paul Dooley (the father in “Breaking
Away”) is a perfect Wimpy, forever curiously sniffing a hamburger with a
connoisseur’s fanatic passion. Even the little baby, Swee’ Pea, played by
Altman’s grandson, Wesley Ivan Hurt, looks like typecasting.
But
it’s not enough that the characters and the locations look their parts. Altman
has breathed life into this material, and he hasn’t done it by pretending it’s
camp, either. He organizes a screenful of activity, so carefully choreographed
that it’s a delight, for example to watch the moves as the guests in Olive’s
rooming house make stabs at the plates of food on the table.
There
are several set pieces. One involves Popeye’s arrival at Sweethaven, another a
stop on his lonely quest for his long-lost father. Another is the big wedding
day for Bluto and Olive Oyl, with Olive among the missing and Bluto’s temper
growing until steam jets from his ears. There is the excursion to the amusement
pier, and the melee at the dinner table, and the revelation of the true
identity of a mysterious admiral, and the kidnapping of Swee’ Pea, and then the
kidnapping of Olive Oyl and her subsequent wrestling match with a savage
octopus.
The
movie’s songs, by Harry Nilsson, fit into all of this quite effortlessly.
Instead of having everything come to a halt for the musical set pieces, Altman
stitches them into the fabric. Robin Williams sings Popeye’s anthem, “I
Yam What I Yam” with a growling old sea dog’s stubbornness. Bluto’s
“I’m Mean” has an undeniable conviction, and so does Olive Oyl’s song
to Bluto, “He’s Large.” Shelley Duvall’s performance as Olive Oyl
also benefits from the amazingly ungainly walking style she brings to the
movie.
“Popeye,”
then, is lots of fun. It suggests that it is possible to take the broad strokes
of a comic strip and turn them into sophisticated entertainment. What’s needed
is the right attitude toward the material. If Altman and his people had been
the slightest bit condescending toward “Popeye,” the movie might have
crash-landed. But it’s clear that this movie has an affection for
“Popeye,” and so much regard for the sailor man that it even bothers
to reveal the real truth about his opinion of spinach.
