the charms of olive oyl
by
Douglas Messerli
Jack
Ward and Irving Dressler (screenplay), Izzy Sparber (director) Popeye the
Sailor: Shape Ahoy / 1954
But it’s just at that moment that Olive
Oyl appears on a shipwrecked raft, and both are given the opportunity to reveal
their hypocrisy. Olive is hungry, and together they tell her to find her own
food, but separately both pour food down her invisible gullet, not even showing
up as a limp in Olive’s stick-figure profile.
When Olive goes swimming, singing “I’m in
the mood for live,” both men dive in and apparently do some serious smooching
before their rise to the surface in one another’s arms. Obviously Bluto and
Popeye are the unexpected lovers.
It doesn’t take long, even without Popeye’s
Spinach, for the two to start battling it out, this time with the truck of a
palm tree.
Olive Oyl, however, is not even around to see their attempts to win her, as the camera
pans to a young singer, clearly a cartoon version of a very young Frank
Sinatra, before which Olive has already swooned.
Presumably, with some regret, but with deeper
commitment, Bluto and Popeye have no choice but to return to the Bachelor’s den,
or as Ray on Letterboxd deems it, their “Garden of He-den.”
Los
Angeles, June 15, 2025
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).
No comments:
Post a Comment