POPEYE
(1980)
Review by Pauline Kael
There are no forebears or influences that would help to explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she doesn’t seem to owe anything to anyone. She’s an original who has her own limpid way of doing things—a simplicity that isn’t marred by conventional acting technique, but that by now she has adapted to a wide range of characters. In the new Robert Altman film, Popeye, from Jules Feififer’s screenplay, in which she plays Olive Oyl, she sings in a small, wavering voice, and she hits tones that are so flat yet so true that they are transcendently comic. Her dancing has the grave gentleness of the Laurel & Hardy soft-shoe numbers, though she doesn’t move anything like either of them. She’s Olive Oyl of the long neck and stringbean body and the clodhoppers, and at the same time she has a high-fashion beauty. The screwed-tight hair twisted into a cruller at the neck seems just what Olive needs to set off her smooth, rounded forehead. She curls her long legs around each other—entwining them in the rubber-legged positions of the cartoon figure—and it seems the most natural thing for her to do.
Olive lives in Sweethaven, a tumbledown seacoast Dogpatch, and she’s the local belle. When she’s teased about getting engaged to the domineering, wide-as-a-barn Captain Bluto, the most hated and feared man in town, she gets the desperate, trapped expression of a girl who knows that she has made a terrible mistake, and, trying to find a virtue in Bluto (who snorts like a bull and looks as if he’d be more comfortable on all fours), she answers, “He’s large.” And the plaintive defensiveness—the sense of hopelessness—she brings to those words is so pure that you may feel a catch in your throat while you’re smiling. When Popeye, the squinting sailor, searching the seven seas for the pappy who ditched him when he was an infant, arrives at Sweethaven, he moves into the boarding house run by the Oyl family. Olive is very uppity to Popeye and to everyone else; she holds her head high on her tube of a neck and sniffs like a duchess. “Persnickety” is the word for Olive, but there are delicate shades of stubbornness and confusion in her face, and sometimes a frightened look in her eyes. Shelley Duvall takes the funny-page drawing of Olive Oyl and breathes her own spirit in to it. Possibly she can do this so simply because she accepts herself as a cartoon to start with, and, working from that, goes way past it. So far past it that we begin to find chic in her soft, floppy white collars and her droopy, elongated skirts.
