The Nutty Professor (1963)

[StevePulaski]

The Nutty Professor (1963)
Directed by: Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor.

Rating: ★★

The 1996 Eddie Murphy remake of The Nutty Professor might've been the first time since the 1983 remake of Scarface that a reimagining gave more life to its original counterpart than the latter ever initially received. Jerry Lewis's original idea for The Nutty Professor - essentially showing an introvert magically become an extrovert through the wonders of indescribable pseudoscience - is a potent one, but it's the strange case where the original idea lacked energy and charisma that the remake would inevitably come and exploit, successfully making the concept its own.

In this 1963 film, Lewis plays Julius Kelp, the epitome of a high-socked, socially awkward geek of a professor who conducts a wide variety of scientific experiments. When he's publicly humiliated by a jock, Kelp decides to invent a special serum that turns him into a handsome stud known as "Buddy Love," who is suaver than Julius could ever hope to be.

The success of his new serum makes the school's most gorgeous girl, Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens) finally notice him. Though she despises Buddy, she can't help but find herself attracted to his ways, as well as his prowess in things like music and social confidence. It's not until the serum begins to wear off and manipulate Julius in ways not originally intended that he begins to be exposed for the fraud he is, and risks losing the only thing he's ever had going for him in his own social life.

On top of the strangeness and slightly offputting fact that Julius falls in love with one of his much younger students (at least in the remake it was a graduate student), Lewis's overblown caricature of a geek is an intolerable archetype every moment he's on-screen - even worse than Steve Urkel on Family Matters. His incessant voice and his inability to function on the most basic sense doesn't even render the empathy of social anxiety but completely inept and careless screenwriting of the most grating order. Lewis's cartoon of a lead character exhausted me to the point where I was put off from him long before the film even reached the halfway point.

When Lewis morphs into Buddy Love, while the costuming is terrific, the character is almost as insufferable, despite being more coherent. This means we have two lead characters that are equally contemptible, not one better than the other. Going back to the remake of Nutty Professor, we at least had a likable character in Eddie Murphy's Sherman Klump character, and Murphy's tour-de-force performance carried the film to great comedic heights. With all this in contrast, while The Nutty Professor does indeed boast an interesting premise, it can't hold a candlestick to its successor that came three decades down the road.

Starring: Jerry Lewis, Stella Stevens, Del More, and Kathleen Freeman. Directed by: Jerry Lewis.