Izzy Sparber | Popeye the Sailor: Shape Ahoy / 1954

the charms of olive oyl

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Ward and Irving Dressler (screenplay), Izzy Sparber (director) Popeye the Sailor: Shape Ahoy / 1954

 

Bluto and Popeye have finally made a truce and are vacationing on their perfect misogynistic work, a garden of he-men, where you can pile up the beer can and remnants of former meals without even worrying. They share talk of their new Eden.

     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).