‘Know what’s on the telly tonight?’ said excitedly a classmate at my primary school.’ ‘No, what?’ I answered. ‘Popeye!’ he exclaimed. I wondered who this Popeye was since I had never heard of him before. That evening I watched my first Popeye cartoon and immediately fell in love with the brazen, sometimes ingenuous but always triumphant character that had to constantly fight it out with Bluto the bully for the affection of Olive Oyl and with his can of spinach at the last moment helping him to win the day.
Fast-forward to 1980 and Popeye appeared on the big screen at our local Odeon in the guise of Robin Williams as the indomitable sailor man and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, his scatter-brain woman.
It was the wonderful Robin Williams’ first major film role and yet I was not unduly taken by it. I couldn’t understand a musical where the songs were so unmemorable, a plot which seemed so inconsequential and a dialogue which appeared to be largely the sailor’s incomprehensible mumblings.
The best thing about the film for me was the picturesque setting of Sweethaven the seaside fishing village where the drama was played out.
We were motoring along the southern Maltese coast when, suddenly, we came across what seemed to be an attractive fishing village.
It was Sweethaven, the film set for ‘Popeye’ and appears to have been built in a much longer-lasting way than most other film sets causing the film-making budget to increase alarmingly to twenty million dollars. (In fact, the film recouped its costs making almost three times as much).
Constructed film sets are by definition evanescent articles. True, when actual places are used then they will attract visits. Goodness knows how often the two major historic buildings in our part of London have been used for shooting films. The Royal Naval College appears, for example, in the version of ‘The Bounty’ starring Anthony Hopkins and much of the TV series ‘Porterhouse Blue’ takes place in Charlton house.
Despite its supposed schmaltzy connotations, Sweethaven turned out to be a fun experience. In fact, a really sweet one. We enjoyed visiting the village’s pseudo-nineteenth century north-west American coastal architecture and found the museum exhibits on the making of the film and the history of Popeye himself fascinating. We were also entertained by the show depicting Popeye and Olive Oyl’s wedding and even joined in and were immortalized in the film that was taken of it!
Our visit to Sweethaven reminded us that Malta’s heritage is not only baroque fortifications and Neolithic temples but also involves its location for feature films. For example, ‘Gladiator’ (Oliver Reed, the owner of the gladiator school in the film, died after a drinking binge in Valletta’s ‘The Pub’), the ‘Da Vinci code’, and several James Bond films, including ‘Never say Never’, were all shot in Malta. There’s a more complete list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_shot_in_Malta
Popeye sang “I yam what I yam an’ tha’s all I yam”. He also uttered “That’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more!” which is what a lot of us feel at the moment regarding a major world health crisis! That’s why it’s so nice to hark back to our visits before the world changed for ever and when the great Robin Williams was still alive.
May the spirit of Popeye live in all of us during these hard times!
