The Nutty Professor (1963)

To improve his social life, a nerdish professor drinks a potion that temporarily turns him into the handsome, but obnoxious, Buddy Love.

Director:

Jerry Lewis

Writers:

Jerry Lewis, Bill Richmond

Stars:

Jerry Lewis, Stella Stevens, Del Moore

1 win & 1 nomination.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Jerry Lewis	...	Prof. Julius Kelp / Buddy Love
Stella Stevens	...	Stella Purdy
Del Moore	...	Dr. Mortimer S. Warfield
Kathleen Freeman	...	Millie Lemmon
Med Flory	...	Warzewski
Norman Alden	...	Football Player / Student
Howard Morris	...	Elmer Kelp
Elvia Allman	...	Edwina Kelp
Milton Frome	...	Dr. M. Sheppard Leevee
Buddy Lester	...	Bartender
Marvin Kaplan	...	English Student
David Landfield	...	College Student
Skip Ward	...	Football Player
Julie Parrish	...	College Student
Henry Gibson	...	Gibson - College Student

Storyline

Nerd. Milquetoast. Klutz. These are just three of the many undesirable words that can be used to describe Professor Julius Kelp. But all that changes when the chemistry expert invents a potion that transforms him into a suave, sexy chick magnet, whom Julius aptly names Buddy Love. Unfortunately, there's one side effect: Buddy can't control when he'll change back into Julius, an event that always happens at inopportune times. How will Julius/Buddy resolve his Jekyll-and-Hyde dilemma?

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Plot Keywords:

chemistry | professor | potion | nerd | jekyll and hyde | 

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Taglines:

Well, any scientist who makes a girl like this can't be all mad.

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Genres:

Comedy | Romance | Sci-Fi

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Did You Know?

Trivia

One of the things that separated Lewis from other actors playing nerds and geeks was his skillful use of pathos; mixing the sad with the funny. The first 30 minutes of the film portrays Kelp as a clumsy, pathetic social creature. By the time he's lurching around his laboratory trying to find a remedy for his experiment-gone-wrong he's now been turned into an actual creature. The audience has become heartbroken before the plot twists into its surprisingly new direction.

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Goofs

Early in the film, when the fireman rush to rescue Kelp after the explosion, the floor outside his classroom is a single beige color. Throughout the rest of the movie the hall floor is a dark brown with beige borders.

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Quotes

Dr. Hamius R. Warfield: Now try to understand that I understand, that scientists and creators have their little eccentricities. Einstein hated hair cuts, Da Vinci love to paint, and Newton...
Professor Julius Kelp: He had something to do with figs, didn't he?

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Crazy Credits

False ending which first displays, "That's all, folks!!" then inserts a NOT in between "that's" and "all," then a 5-minute story epilogue goes to the actual ending, which is credited as "The beginning." The actor credits are done as curtain calls, with each performer bowing behind their name.

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Connections

Referenced in American Dreams: The Home Front (2002)

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Soundtracks

I'm in the Mood for Love
(uncredited)
Music by Jimmy McHugh
Lyrics by Dorothy Fields
Sung by Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love at the Purple Pit student nightclub.

User Reviews

Hidelle and Jerk?

On the Nutty Professor DVD extras, Jerry Lewis says that he had been "enthralled with Jekyll and Hyde" since he was a kid. So it's only logical that he'd long to create this "Jekyll and Hyde comedy/musical". Oddly, The Nutty Professor tends to be read as only a comedy, in the modern colloquial sense of that genre term, as "a film that's supposed to make you laugh", but there's much more to it than that, and more intended than that. Which is probably a good thing, because even though I didn't laugh out loud very frequently while watching The Nutty Professor, I did enjoy it quite a bit, despite the flaws.

Lewis--who also directs--plays Professor Julius Kelp, a bizarrely nerdy-but-stupid chemistry professor. He has a knack for conducting dangerous, unauthorized experiments in the presence of students. At the beginning of the film, he blows up his classroom yet again. On a later day, a football student who was denied permission to leave class early for football practice responds by stuffing Kelp into a shelf. Beautiful student Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens) feels sorry for Kelp and helps him unstuff himself. Stevens skillfully has the slightest gleam in her eye while doing this so that we can tell that Purdy has an attraction to the strange-looking professor.

Spurred on by the incident--with both the physical abuse and the physical attraction as motivators, Kelp decides to give himself a make over. He first tries his luck at the local gym. When that doesn't work out so well he puts his chemistry knowledge to use and hits upon a potion that produces a Jekyll & Hyde transformation. The Nutty Professor has Kelp trying to balance the two personalities, with the expected calamitous but humorous results.

Although Lewis' Hyde character, "Buddy Love", is often said to be a skewering of his early comedy partner and pal Dean Martin, Lewis claims this wasn't the case. Both the nerd and the debonair but sublimely obnoxious hipster were supposedly amalgamations of different people Lewis had encountered over the years. Still, the similarities to Martin are difficult to deny; perhaps the character was partially a subconscious parody of Martin.

In any event, Love is entertaining to watch--he's something like a glossy trainwreck. Or maybe like a suave Satan in a silk suit. Lewis makes both characters complex in their differences from their respective stereotypes. Kelp is the stereotypical "absent-minded professor", only the absent-minded professor is usually a wiz at his academic subject. Lewis paints Kelp as primarily a wiz at being a slightly sympathetic dork, where his cockeyed chemistry successes are more accidental. Love is the stereotypical overbearing but attractive-to-the-women brute, yet Lewis is quick to imbue him with an odd combination of pathos and flair, so that Love ends up being both more fragile and more talented/intelligent.

Some of the material employing both characters is quite funny, but Lewis dwells on humor no more than a whole gamut of modes and emotions, from fairly serious horror material during the slightly overlong initial Jekyll/Hyde transformation to poignantly sad, touching scenes showing the crack in the Love armor. To an extent, the Jekyll/Hyde theme permeates the film in its shifting tones.

One of those modes that works surprisingly well is the musical material. Lewis hired the superb Les Brown and other great jazz musicians to provide songs. Les Brown's "Band of Renown" even makes an on screen appearance, performing a couple songs at a college dance. Lewis isn't the greatest singer, but he does a passable job with an alluring rendition of "That Old Black Magic". There's also a great version of "Stella by Starlight" in the background of a couple scenes.

The performances are quite good. Both Stevens and Del Moore, as Dr. Hamius R. Warfield, the college dean, easily hold their own next to Lewis, who does a remarkable job with the transformations. He's helped a lot by W. Wallace Kelley's cinematography. Kelley had a more than respectable, varied background, including camera experience on a couple Alfred Hitchcock films--To Catch A Thief (1955) and Vertigo (1958)--and Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Kelley uses very subtle angle changes to make Kelp seem small and insignificant (aided by Lewis' physical contortions) while making Love seem like a big, macho guy.

The production design is also gorgeous. Lewis directs his crew to fill the film with bold, unusual color combinations--most overtly in the rainbow-colored paints on the lab floor during the first Jekyll/Hyde transformation, the nice overlaying of purples and reds in The Purple Pit club, and the great, unusual coordinations of Love's suits.

Whether you find The Nutty Professor hilarious or not, it has certainly been influential. Lewis considers this his best film. The American Film Institute placed The Nutty Professor at number ninety-nine on its list of the "100 Funniest American Films" ("100 Years/100 Laughs"). Both Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey have obviously been influenced by this film, as they have been by Lewis in general. And Andy Kaufman's disparate characters Latka Gravas (from 1978-1983's "Taxi") and Tony Clifton (a regular part of his live act) are direct parallels to Kelp and Love, even if Kaufman had other influences for those characters, as well.

The Nutty Professor is also a "message" film. The dual "morals" of the story, in addition to the less conspicuous subtexts dealing with personal identity, are to not be afraid to be your true self and to accept others for their true selves--to look deeper than the surface level.

Given such wide-ranging moods and aims, it's probably best to watch the film without genre expectations. That's not likely to make those averse to Lewis' shtick enjoy it any more, but for everyone else, The Nutty Professor is worth a look. It will surprise you with its diversity.

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

7 June 1963 (USA)

Also Known As:

The Nutty Professor

Filming Locations:

Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

Box Office

Gross USA:

$7,630,000

Company Credits

Production Co:

Paramount Pictures, Jerry Lewis Films

Technical Specs

Runtime:

107 min

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1