The movie Quentin Tarantino called an “awful atrocity” and how it “fucked the audience”
There are lots of movies that Quentin Tarantino doesn’t like, and he’s made it perfectly clear that he wants everyone to know just how much he hates them.
However, he reserved a special kind of ire for the unlikeliest of films, although there’s a sneaking suspicion that his vitriol was driven at least in part by the fact that it was helmed by a director he hasn’t had many kind words to say about. Even still, he let rip on this one.
He might be one of the most important figures in ‘New Hollywood’ and one of the era’s most celebrated auteurs, but Tarantino is no fan of Robert Altman. Having summed up the latter’s contributions to cinema by calling him “a fucking pothead who doesn’t know any better,” it’s clear the former wasn’t sold.
For his money, Altman’s Brewster McCloud is “one of the worst movies to ever carry a studio logo,” Quintet is “terrible, boring, and pointless,” and McCabe & Mrs Miller‘s first reel is “the worst-mixed reel in the history of Hollywood cinema,” which makes it three of the filmmaker’s pictures he actively despised.
There was a fourth, though, and it was Popeye, of all things. The coke-fuelled production that gave Robin Williams his first starring role in a feature and saw its disused sets turned into a Maltese tourist attraction wasn’t the Nashville mastermind’s finest hour, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who abhors it more than Tarantino.
The way he remembers it, “part of the pre-release publicity surrounding Altman’s Popeye was that the climax would contain one of the greatest cinematic fights of all time,” a notion he couldn’t have agreed with more. “Truly absurd for anyone who has sat through Altman’s awful atrocity on the memory of [EC] Segar’s sailor man creation.”
In the film, Williams’ Popeye isn’t a big fan of spinach, which, for whatever reason, Tarantino took as the ultimate transgression. Every fight between the title hero and his arch-nemesis, Bluto, is obligated to end with the sailor man with the gigantic forearms necking his spinach and snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Since that didn’t happen on Altman’s watch, he “perversely denies the audience this cathartic climax.”
“Popeye was a joint venture of both Disney and Paramount, so when Altman fucked the audience on that picture, he fucked Disney and Paramount both,” he added. “It didn’t matter that the film did well. They so hated what Altman delivered to them, which was so different from both what they wanted and what he promised to make, that studios refused to hire him for the next two decades.”
It’s literally a case of Popeye not eating spinach to win the final showdown, but if you’re Quentin Tarantino, that’s clearly a case of how Altman “doesn’t want to just upturn expectations, he wants to cynically piss on them.” Why does he think the director forewent one of the character’s most famous personality traits? “Just to be a fucker,” apparently.
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