Part of 2024 In Tribute and Music City Mondays
Robin Williams stars as one-eyed sailor Popeye (his first feature film role) who rows into the harbor of Sweethaven looking for his long-lost Pappy. Rooming at the Oyl household, he meets Olive (Shelley Duvall in a role only she could pull off). Before he can win her heart, he must first contend with her fiancé Bluto. Familiar friends Wimpy and Swee’pea play into things as well in Altman’s rollicking musical take (thanks to a bussin score by Harry Nilsson) on the classic cartoon.
“Shelley Duvall was fated to be the definitive Olive Oyl, the long-legged, construction-booted, occasionally irascible beloved of the one and only Popeye…. Miss Duvall is superb — genteely ladylike one minute, a woman of volcanic passions the next.” —Vincent Canby, New York Times (Dec 12, 1980) “The embodiment of all that is good about POPEYE is Duvall’s Olive Oyl…. As many have said, she was ‘born to play Olive Oyl, but it’s a real performance, too, flighty and distracted, yet sweet to the core, with perfect little ‘oooooo’ sounds whenever there’s trouble (she’s like a Marge Simpson precursor) and a moony romanticism that carries the spirit of the whole production.” —Scott Tobias, The Dissolve
