Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980)

Robert Altman’s Popeye plays more like a self-absorbed, semi-penetrable mystery than a family entertainment (especially by today’s standards) – a lonely sailor turns up in a strange town, his conversation barely penetrable, finding little welcome among the eccentrically downtrodden inhabitants, who are over-taxed, often physically maligned by the local strongman, and apparently stuck in narrowly repetitive lives and behaviour patterns (although the community does include a gambling den and even an apparent brothel). His purpose is to find his long-lost father, and he eventually succeeds, although it barely seems to matter by then to either of them, his affections diverted onto a cruelly abandoned baby which he immediately takes on as his own, and via whom he rapidly acquires a sort of surrogate wife (that would be Olive Oyl), although there’s not a hint of what you’d call “chemistry” between them. They’re all put in peril by the evil Bluto, with Popeye discovering at the last minute the transformative powers of canned spinach, but little of this registers as a meaningful narrative. The movie’s great strengths are its tangibility, both in evoking the rickety all-in-it-togetherness of Sweethaven (which lives on as a tourist attraction in Malta) and in the physicality of the clowning, and of course its abundance of the texture we always prize in Altman – the sense of lives in motion, of a world that doesn’t stop at the edge of the frame. It just all seems rather strange, when what’s actually in the middle of the frame is so weird and unapproachable. Robin Williams’ performance seems largely directed at himself, no doubt as instructed; Harry Nilsson’s songs, somehow managing to be simultaneously negligible and memorable, perfectly suit the rest of the film. There was no sequel, but if there had been, I like to imagine they would have offered the job to Raul Ruiz…