| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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THE NUTTY PROFESSOR
Rating:  ½
USA. 1963.
Director/Story – Jerry Lewis, Screenplay – Jerry Lewis & Bill Richmond, Producer – Ernest D. Glucksman, Photography – W. Wallace Kelley, Music – Walter Scharf, Special Effects – Paul K. Lerpae, Art Direction – Hal Pereira & Walter Tyler. Production Company – Jerry Lewis Productions/Paramount.
Cast:
Jerry Lewis (Professor Julius F. Kelp/Buddy Love), Stella Stevens (Stella Purdy), Del Moore (Dr Hamius R. Warfield)
Plot: Tired of being pushed around by others bigger than he, nerdish chemistry professor Julius Kelp starts researching into physical fitness and muscle-building. He comes up with a potion that transforms him into the ultra-smooth, ultra-egotistical lounge lizard Buddy Love.
It is said that one has to be French to appreciate Jerry Lewis’s brand of slapstick. Many audiences find Lewis’s slapstick idiocies very much an acquired taste. But even if one cannot stand Jerry Lewis they should try and give The Nutty Professor, by far and away his best work, a chance.
Jerry Lewis plays auteur here – directing, starring and co-writing – and The Nutty Professor is really his comedic variation on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Jerry Lewis comic persona has always centred around him casting himself as a gauche nerd frequently verging on the imbecilic. And for him the Dr Jekyll story becomes the basis for a peculiarly touching synthesis of wimp wish-fulfillment and bathos. When Lewis’s painfully downtrodden nerd takes the Dr Jekyll potion what he transforms into is an over-the-top parody of cool and success with women.
The story is repetitive and some gags like the talking bird and the flashback to his childhood don’t work at all, but the jokes nevertheless come quite lively. Lewis’s performance, vying between Kelp, played as a cross between a 1940s racial caricature of a Japanese and a Neanderthal, and Buddy Love, a pointed and clever parody of Lewis’s former partner Dean Martin, is marvelous. Throughout the actual transformation is never seen and the ending wherein Buddy Love wilts away to become Kelp again contains a moment of true nakedness and is a superb piece of acting on Lewis’s part.
The Nutty Professor was of course later remade as the Eddie Murphy vehicle The Nutty Professor (1996), wherein Murphy plays a 400 pound professor who transforms into a self-centred, testostoronally-hyped fitness freak. It is highly enjoyable too and contains probably Murphy’s best performance. It was sequelized as the lesser The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000). The Nutty Professor (2007) was an animated sequel to this film, featuring the exploits of Julius Kelp’s son and with Jerry Lewis reprising his role by voice.
Jerry Lewis’s only other ventures into fantastic cinema were as an alien visitor in Visit to a Small Planet (1960) and in the title role of the sex-reversed Cinderella, Cinderfella (1960).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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