Spinach Cinema Revisited

This is scary. For years I had jeered at the 1980 Robert Altman movie Popeye for being such a bad movie. And yet when I watched a little bit of it the other night, I actually found myself liking it.

Granted, there was always a little bit of me that found it hard to hate the movie altogether. After all, when Robin Williams made this movie, he was just beginning his career as a movie actor which meant he not only put an effort into his performance but was actually quite pleasant to watch on screen. Plus he and Shelley Duvall had a chemistry that I readily took for granted at the time yet find myself missing all too often in many of today's movies. Paul L. Smith made for a convincing Bluto and of course, many of the movie's songs were not only quite good -- especially "I'm Mean," "He Needs Me" and "I Yam What I Yam" -- but hold up quite nicely compared to some of the tunes issuing from more recent movie musicals.

But when I was younger, I used to love to proclaim my dislike for that movie. Who needs a Popeye movie so obviously aimed at the type of people who hate Popeye? I thought. And indeed, the biggest black mark against Popeye back in the day was that it was so obviously not made for the type of people like me who had grown up watching the old Paramount and King Features Syndicate Popeye cartoons.

But that didn't mean it was bad. And though I remember waxing nostalgic for those old Popeye cartoons back in my twenties -- not so much the King Features Syndicate cartoons of the 1960s which were pretty primitive in their animation but the Paramount cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s which seemed a bit more sophisticated -- a more recent viewing of said cartoons convinced me that they don't hold up as well as I had thought they did. Indeed, few cartoons from my youth which were not made by Disney or Looney Tunes hold up as well as I would like -- and yet I never thought of myself as being particularly choosy when it came to cartoons.

However, tastes do change even when you don't want them to and the older you get, the more they change. I can't pretend I entirely hate the Popeye cartoons of old, but I also can't pretend that such cartoons are as emotionally satisfying as Robert Altman's film. Sure, bits of that movie are corny and scriptwriter Jules Feiffer seems an odd choice for a Popeye movie. Given the current political climate, I can't help but think it's funny that most of the gags revolving around the evilness of tax collectors would most likely face more criticism today from political southpaws than from cultural conservatives while said cultcons would be more curious as to why director Robert Altman chose to include a whorehouse in a so-called family movie -- especially one which starred his own grandson! And of course, most young Popeye fans would be curious as to why it took so long to get to the climatic battle between Popeye and Bluto -- and why Altman went to such an effort to make such a fight seem so anticlimatic.

Oh, well. Popeye might not have been the type of film I would have appreciated in my youth but now that I'm older, I appreciate it quite well. The romance between Popeye and Olive Oyl seems quite sweet compared to modern-day movie romances and though the movie is not always as funny as it could be, Altman's comparatively subtle approach to comedy seems more interesting to an older moviegoer like myself than a more conventional slapstick approach would have been. 'Tis a pity that it took me so long to realize this. I guessed I could have used more than a few helpings of spinach in my younger days as well.