Cinema: Half Laugh

The Nutty Professor is half a funny movie. As long as Jerry Lewis is minding his myopic business as Professor Kelp, an earnest idiot of a chemistry teacher, the laughs bubble up like soda dumped into acid. But Lewis never knows when to stop fiddling with the formula, and suddenly the comedy blows up in his face.

Professor is a manic switcheroo on the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde theme. Kelp, with his chipmunk teeth, soup-bowl haircut, horn-rimmed half glasses and Neanderthal lope, is fed up with himself. One night in his laboratory he stirs up and quaffs a concoction that will make him strong, handsome and irresistible to women—for what woman could resist a sun-lamp tan, a Shinola coiffure, a high-roll shirt collar, and an electric blue suit with black lapels? Thus decked out, God’s gift to coeds invades the Purple Pit (a Paramount updating of the old campus hangout) to dazzle the denizens. He bullies some fullbacks, sings some songs in a Jerry-built baritone, and tells the chicks to call him Buddy Love. All this is too much for Student Stella Stevens, and off they go to a parking spot in Beverly Hills. But Lewis begins to feel the effects of his potion wearing off, and . . .

Lewis as Kelp is a nimble simpleton. In Professor’s nuttiest sight gag, somebody tosses him a pair of bar bells so ponderous that his arms get stretched to floor-length; that night in bed, when his sock-clad feet poke out of the bottom of the covers, a pair of hands reaches out alongside to give them a sleepy scratch. But Lewis as the alter-ego maniac Buddy Love is a maudlin letdown. Starlet Stevens best sums up the trouble: “Just being one person is more than enough for any human being to handle.”