The Nutty Professor

The next star of the day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Jerry Lewis, whose movies show up tomorrow, August 17. I've got a box set of 10 of his movies, and have blogged about most of them before. Some of the movies in that set are on TCM tomorrow, and the one I haven't blogged about before is The Nutty Professor, which airs at 8:00 PM on August 17.

Lewis plays Julius Kelp, a professor of chemistry at a local university; as the opening credits roll Kelp is doing the sort of experiments stereotypical to the movies: photogenic colored liquids in various forms of glassware, and mixing liquids together to produce stuff that bubbles over. The last experiment, however, sets off an explosion that rocks the whole campus, especially the administration building where the trustees are meeting. So college president Dr. Warfield (Del Moore) is none too pleased.

The next day in class, one of Dr. Kelp's students is revealed to be a player on the football team, not taking a course like Rocks for Jocks or Clouds. (To be fair, my freshman fall I was in Multivariable Calculus with a future NFL starting quarterback.) Dr. Kelp is disappointed that one of his students puts athletics over academics, and the football player responds by stuffing Dr. Kelp into a closet. Helping out of the closet is another student, Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens).

Dr. Kelp has up to now been the apotheosis of the 98-pound weakling pictured in the old Charles Atlas-type ads: small, a voice not suitable for radio, wearing thick glasses, and the like. So Kelp decides that he's going to try to change himself by going to a gym, which is really just an excuse for an extended scene of Jerry Lewis-style visual and physical humor, not that that's a bad thing. But of course the upshot is that working out does not, in fact, work out for Prof. Kelp.

So instead, he decides to subscribe to the idea of better living through chemistry, which makes sense considering that he's a chemist. As with Village of the Giants several weeks back, Julius starts mixing all sorts of chemicals, and then experimenting on himself. But instead of the result turning him into a giant, it turns him into a lounge lizard, which is in many ways a good thing for him in that the students like to hang out at just such a lounge, and Stella has suggested Dr. Kelp show up there.

So Kelp, having taken the potion, turns into a suave alter ego he calls Buddy Love, and shows up as Love at the student lounge. Stella is taken by Buddy Love, and eventually all the students are intrigued by him. Of course, the potion is bound to wear off, and when it does, it has all sorts of problems and consequences. More surprising is the fact that nobody seems to put two and two together for the longest time.

The Nutty Professor is, like many of Jerry Lewis' movies, one that doesn't exactly have the greatest of scripts, in that the plot is once again more a vehicle for Jerry Lewis' brand of humor than it is something that drives a story. Now, in a movie like The Bellboy, the sketches really work. The Nutty Professor isn't quite as good, but much of the material does come off fairly well. The Kelp character and the absurd transformation are also obvious places to mine humor, something that Lewis does quite well here.

If you haven't seen The Nuty Professor before, definitely see it since it's airing now.