Search - The Nutty Professor on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1963 DVD Release: 10/17/2000 Format: DVD - Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV Edition: Special Collection Audio Tracks: English, French Subtitles: English SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 47 mins Studio: Paramount Members Wishing: 6 Genres: Comedy, Satire, Romantic Comedy, Sci-Fi Comedy See Also: The Nutty Professor [Special Collector's Edition], Nutty Professor [Circuit City Exclusive] [Checkpoint]

Professor Julius F. Kelp (Jerry Lewis) is an addle-brained, absent-minded chemistry instructor always incurring the wrath of the university administration by continually blowing up the classroom laboratory. The shy guy has his eyes on the student body of Stella (Stella Stevens). When a football-playing bully humiliates him, Kelp tries to concoct a chemical to help him gain physical strength and stature. The potion turns him into the handsome, hard-edged nightclub singer named Buddy Love. The mild-mannered professor's alter ego becomes a self-absorbed campus favorite at the Purple Pit, a hangout for hip cats and kittens. Stella falls for the enigmatic entertainer who wows the crowd with his jazzy, breezy delivery and cool demeanor. Buddy mixes it up with the bartender (Buddy Lester), who is instructed on how to mix the latest drinks by the professor-turned-party animal. The drawback of the potion is that it wears off at the most embarrassing an inopportune times for Buddy, turning him back into the helpless Kelp. Buddy performs at the annual student dance, and while on the dais, the elixir starts to wear off. The students and staff watch in amazement as he changes back into the professor. He gives an impassioned plea that people must learn to like themselves before others can like them in return. Stella still wants to be the teacher's pet, and the two make future plans together. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Jerry Lewis - Prof. Julius Ferris Kelp
Stella Stevens - Stella Purdy
Del Moore - Dr. Hamius R. Warfield
Kathleen Freeman - Millie Lemmon
Med Flory - Football Player
Howard Morris - Father Kelp

A fairly early Paramount DVD release (from 2000), Jerry Lewis' The Nutty Professor has been issued on a digital disc that's good, at least as far as it goes. The movie comes in an excellent letterboxed transfer (1.85:1), capturing the original theatrical non-anamorphic widescreen image perfectly. There is a smidgen of picture information added at the sides and unnecessary image removed at the top and bottom, and the overall effect is to focus Lewis' directorial eye with laser-like precision for each gag, when there are gags, and on the intensity of his performance, when he slips into his Sinatra-like "Buddy Love" guise. The color is gleaming -- bordering on radiant -- especially in the laboratory and nightclub scenes (which, curiously enough, are the two arenas in which Lewis' Jekyll-and-Hyde character operates), and the 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound adds an element of dimensionality to the audio that even comes through on one's monitor speakers -- check out the scene with Kathleen Freeman in the wrecked laboratory in the opening and see if there aren't lots of different audio textures in play.

The disc opens on a simple two-layer menu, without a trailer but with a rather self-congratulatory documentary short, "Paramount in the '50s" -- it takes a rosy view of the '50s, overall and where movies were concerned (30 percent of the theaters in America had closed by 1955), and offers us enticing glimpses of some of the studio's best productions of that decade. Evidently, To Catch a Thief was restored a long time before it got to us on DVD in 2002, and a few of those shown, like Come Back, Little Sheba and The Country Girl, have still not made it out on DVD. There is a selection of English subtitles and French mono audio, and the movie has been given 15 well-chosen chapters. All of that is fine, and speaks well for this disc, but there is a lot more that could and should have been done with this movie -- one of Lewis' greatest achievements. It cries out for a director's commentary track or, barring that, at least a commentary track by someone who appreciates the complexity and daring of this film and its boldness as a comedic achievement, for Lewis as a performer and a director. In the realm of comedy, this is as singular an achievement as anything that Chaplin, Keaton, or Lloyd (nevermind John Landis) ever did in the field, or that Coppola or Bogdanovich have achieved in a dramatic context, and deserves a few extra bells and whistles. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide