Popeye, as a film, is nearly inexplicable. Watching it, one gets the impression that no one knows why they were making it. Was the world crying out desperately for a live action, musical version of the cartoon? No. Robert Evans, producer, was. And he got Robert Altman, Robin Williams, and Shelley Duvall to go along with him. The result is a total mess with a really cute kid.

Actually, if we'd left it at that, things might not be a total wash. What really confuses things is the music and lyrics by Harry Nilsson. It's the worst musical I've ever heard. Every single song is constructed as an endless repetition of one phrase that's not even that good to begin with: “blow me down,” “he's large,” “everything is food food food,” “I am what I am” et cetera. Yes, these are songs. You might remember “He Needs Me” from Punchdrunk Love, where its inexplicable presence grants it a sort of absurd beauty. Not here. Olive Oyl literally repeats the title phrase at least seven times in a row, and then does it again. Did Nilsson run out of words? Is there really nothing more to say once Popeye has admitted that he is what he is? Admittedly, being “strong to the finish, cuz he eats his spinach” isn't Tony Award material, but at least it goes somewhere. There's a cause and effect.

Most of the other elements in the movie are mixed blessings. Altman directs great group scenes, and the Oyl family is a lot of fun if you can catch what they're saying to each other. But his grasp of conventional narrative is not the best, and for a cartoon-made-film you need a pretty basic, solid through-line. Williams mostly manages to avoid being himself (his chief actorly detriment) and is a good Popeye, when he doesn't ad lib too much. Shelley Duvall's Olive Oyl, however, is phenomenal. It's amazing anyone else was ever considered. Even more incredibly, I found myself kind of affected by Popeye and Olive's burgeoning affair, especially the scene where Popeye tells Olive she can now take Swee' Pea out for walks because now she cares what happens to Popeye. There's a strange tension between them that really works. And Swee' Pea is a fantastic baby actor. She's probably the best of the bunch. Her reactions are uniformly charming, and some of them are even due to what's happening on screen and not some toy off camera somewhere.

But these few scenes just go to show how really awful this movie is. Because they make you realize someone could have made a decent picture out of this, as odd as that sounds. Cut the songs and a random “buried treasure” plotline that crops up about fifteen minutes before the end and you'd have a fun, idiosyncratic film that adults and kids could enjoy. And maybe some of them did, but it's just so uneven that my memories of having enjoyed it as a child were curiously devoid of every single musical number and the ending. My memories, actually, consisted entirely of Olive and Popeye interacting with the baby. So maybe one day there will be My Cut of the film that will be about an hour long and still probably make no sense but be kind of cute. Maybe I'll even come up with something for Bluto to do instead of growling and being mindlessly evil.

Oh, and does anyone know why this was filmed in Malta? Because it doesn't look like anyplace in the U.S., and I can't figure out why all these people would be on a rocky outcropping in the Mediterranean.