"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp..."

[fpb]

I just had a look at a couple of movies from my youth. I am confirmed in my view that Robert Altman's Nashville, is one of the greatest movies of all time, probably the greatest American movie ever; but failure though it is, I am not far from thinking that his Popeye deserves even more honour. Who else would have dared to try the impossible to such an extent?

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Not even close. The touch of the surreal in the original strip was not comparable with Segar's masterpiece, nor, for that matter, with the wonderful Fleischer cartoons that Altman followed. I am not going to put down a great cartoonist: but as compared with the reach of Segar's artistry, Gould was one-dimensional. He brought an interesting apparatus of cartoony invention to the crime story, but the fact is that you can find that same touch with a thousand times more depth and invention. And the two movies reflect the potential of the original strips. You could not add depth to Dick Tracy, and therefore the comic strip was the only format for it, and nobody today remembers the live-action serial. But you could extend the surreal madness of Popeye into a world of cartoons, and the Fleischers did just that - and Altman did enough, in my view, to make us feel that it would just about have been possible to go even further. My main issue with his work is the realism of his photography; he ought to have gone for something more stylized and unrealistic, for instance along the lines of an early supercharged Technicolor movie, in order to bring out the absurdism of the original; or, even better, gone back to Charlie Chaplin's work (which was Segar's inspiration in the first place, hence the hulking enemies, bizarre bearded secondary characters, J.Wellington Wimply with his air of half-faded gentility, half-pretending scoundrel, etc).