Beautiful & eccentric (heck, downright peculiar), who but Robert Altman would try to fashion an Art House Family Musical from Jules Feiffer’s loose-limbed/episodic adaptation of early E. C. Segar Popeye comic strips? Though the playing avoids the slavishly creepy copycat style of recent Dr Suess live-action adaptations, nothing seems to work quite as intended. Well, nothing other than the heaven-sent infant playing Swee’pea (Altman’s own grandkid Wesley Ivan Hurt). Even Shelley Duvall, a physically perfect Olive Oyl, is left too often to her own devices (and her own music scale), tripping up on flights of unedited comic lunacy. (Lots of Zasu Pitts in there, too.) Yet while the characters, sketchy storyline (Popeye finds his girl, his Pappy & baby in a basket) and tuneless Harry Nilsson score may leave you scratching your head (so too Altman’s fumbled staging of compound slapstick gags & Robin Williams’ verbal drone in his otherwise appealingly boyish, low center-of-gravity Popeye), there’s something so magically right about Wolf Kroeger’s physical production design and Giuseppe Rotunno’s spellbound cinematography, you quickly recalibrate for the film’s obvious flaws to soak up what’s unique (and uniquely right) in here.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Altman was coming off a deadly series of flops at the time: BUFFALO BILL/’76; 3 WOMEN/’77; A WEDDING/’78; QUINTET; A PERFECT COUPLE/’79; HEALTH/’80. So bad, even POPEYE’s modest commercial success didn’t stop producer Dino De Laurentiis from booting him off RAGTIME/’81, the film project he was born to make.
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