The Nutty Professor and The Ladies' Man

 Jerry Lewis wrote (with Bill Richmond) both The Nutty Professor and The Ladies' Man.  Lewis also directed both pictures.  The Nutty Professor is Lewis third film under his own direction; The Ladies' Man, a much more ambitious and surrealist film, was released in 1962, the year before the The Nutty Professor reached the screen.  Although ostensibly comedies, neither film is funny in any conventional sense; the movies are witty, however, and ambitious in scope, more on the order of social commentary and satire.  (My observation -- it's really not a criticism -- that the pictures aren't funny is, perhaps, idiosyncratic:  The Ladies' Man was a big box-office success and its profits led to Lewis making The Nutty Professor, the next year.  Lewis stars in both pictures and the viewer's response will be, necessarily, inflected by how you perceive the actor's aggressively over-the-top characterizations of his protagonists -- in both case, the heroes are spastic, well-meaning morons wholly devoid of any sex appeal and physically repulsive; they have deformed overbites, wear nerd glasses crookedly over their sweaty brows, and stumble around smashing to bits anything in their path.  Both protagonists have the cringing personality of a badly abused dog -- they seem to be the victims of some combination of horrible torture and brain injury, afflicted by a hideous backstory that is never really explained (there is a hint as to the hero's horrible upbringing in The Nutty Professor and it's really awful to behold.)  Comedy is heartless; it makes no room for pity or sympathy and, therefore, Lewis' pictures are arduous -- his titular characters are figures that would fill  you with horror and sympathy if you encountered them in real life; therefore, it's hard to know how to react to these movies.  The brutality of comedy has sentimentality as its soft underbelly.  When great comedians go wrong, it is usually by way of indulgence in cheap sentimentality.  (This was Chaplin's great failing and is implicit in Lewis' films as well; Laurel and Hardy are superior to Chaplin's "Little Tramp" and Lewis' various mentally retarded schlemiels because they never fall into the trap of wringing a sentimental response from the audience.  Lewis and Chaplin want you to laugh and shed a tear as well --  and this can be off-putting particularly in the context of Lewis' mentally impaired protagonists.  Beholding their plights, are we supposed to laugh, recoil in horror, or cry at their abject  disabilities?  It's to Lewis' credit that his pictures raise this problem, but he, certainly, doesn't solve it.)  '

The Nutty Professor is easier to review -- it's a parody of Stevenson's story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  A hideous and repulsive chemistry teacher with a  penchant for explosives is bullied by a football student in his class.  The teacher, named Dr. Julius Gelp, admires a comely coed, Stella played by the radiant and supremely sexy Stella Stevens.  (She is a bit like a more brash and aggressive Marilyn Monroe --she's got Marilyn's sex appeal without the somewhat freakish aura of victimization with which we associate Miss Monroe.)  Dr. Gelp tries body-building with predictably unsuccessful (and, even, grotesque) results:  a barbell stretches his arms so that  his knuckles drag on the ground level with his toes.  Gelp, then, invents a potion that turns him into a suave, ultra-hip, crooner, a persona called Buddy Love.  Of course, Love effortlessly intimidates men and enthralls all the girls, including Stella.  The problem is that the potion's effects are unstable and Love keeps reverting back to his monstrous origin in the twitchy, repulsively inept form of Dr. Gelp.  The received wisdom is that Lewis is savagely satirizing the stage and screen persona of his former partner and sidekick, Dean Martin.  A more sophisticated version of this analysis proposes that Buddy Love is the harsh and controlling aspect of Lewis' own character, an insular and arrogant figure of the kind that Lewis plays so effectively in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy.  Whatever your interpretation, The Nutty Professor is, perhaps, Lewis' most audience-friendly and accessible picture because the shambling moronic antics of Dr. Gelp are offset by the suave and brutal egomania of Buddy Love, a figure who is more like Frank Sinatra then the rather harmless and avuncular Dean Martin.  The first half of the film is shot like a brightly lit horror movie -- the transformation scenes are marginally scary and there's lot of alchemical accoutrements in the lab.  Lewis has a good feel for locations and sets.  The climax of the film takes place in a purple-carpeted amphitheater with different levels, a bit like the descending neighborhoods in Dante's Hell -- this infernal place is called "The Purple Pit".  Love becomes the king of "the Pit" and all the girls swoon when he swaggers on-stage to tickle the ivories, a cigarette dangling off her lower lip.  Unfortunately, at the height of his performance, Dr. Gelp's horrible adenoidal squeal intervenes and his velvety baritone turns squeaky -- Lewis' vocal work here is a tour de force.  An oddity of this picture (and its precursor) is that Lewis wants the movie to be all things to all people --it's got some uninventive and nasty slapstick, some horror film vibes, musical numbers and, even, a sequence featuring Les Brown and his Band of Renown (that is, a famous night-club act from the Big Band era that was waning when the movie was made.)  The supporting players are uniformly great, particularly the Dean of the School and his obsequious, sexually repressed secretary.  Of course, the film rejects the oily Buddy Love character in favor of the awful Dr. Gelp and the resplendent Stella Stevens is made to fall in love with the hideously repellent chemistry professor -- this is where Lewis' films makes a demand on the audience that can't be accepted.  The director has gone out of his way to show how sexually unappealing Dr. Gelp is -- he'd rather bloviate on chemistry and blow things up than have sex.  So how are we supposed to believe Stella's assertion that she likes (even loves) Dr. Gelp?  To its credit, the movie has a sly jest up its sleeve.  In the last shot, we see Stella walking arm-in-arm with the shambling Dr. Gelp -- Stella's fantastic ass is shown to its best advantage in tight jeans and we see that she has two bottles of chemical potion tucked in her belt; that is, she will be able to summon Buddy Love to her bed whenever he is required.  (Gelp's horrifying parents have bottled the potion and put it on the market.  In a flashback, we see Gelp's mother mercilessly browbeating his father while the little tyke looks on helplessly from his crib; after Gelp's dad has swallowed some of the potion, the shoe is on the other foot and he viciously dominates his wife at the film's climax.  The movie is clever enough, makes its points effectively, and reasonably entertaining -- but the whole project seems a bit disheartening to me.  I will quote the movies' moral:  "You might as well like yourself since you're going to have spend the rest of your life with yourself.."  It's strange that comedy, which tends toward subversion, also reverts so often to tedious moralizing.  

Lewis was able to make The Nutty Professor on the strength of receipts from The Ladies' Man, released in 1962.  This film is either a work of genius or an unwatchable mess -- or, maybe, both at the same time.  It's essentially a surrealist romp with no discernible plot (it shows a situation not a story); to say that the movie's logic is dreamlike does a disservice to the lucidity of dreams.  The movie makes no sense on any level at all.  In a village in which everyone is a hysteric (as witnessed by a chain of bravura sight gags in the opening shot), a spastic,,shuffling fool (he makes Stepin' Fetchit look like Clark Gable) is horrified to find his girlfriend betraying  him with a collegiate thug, a bit like the jocks who tormented Dr. Gelp in The Nutty Professor.  The protagonist, Herbert Herbert Hiebert, vows to have nothing to do with women for the rest of his life.  And so what does he do?  He gets a job as a handyman and jack-of-all-trades at a huge boarding house filled with nubile young women, budding opera singers under the tutelage of the formidable Madam Wellon-Mellon.  The studio indulged Lewis by allowing him to construct an elaborate four-story doll-house, a huge structure with no front facade and fly-away walls and ceiling.  This set has an elevator, palatial rooms, impressive stairways, balconies, dining rooms -- it's extraordinary and all open to view, a voyeur's delight.  The studio also allowed Lewis a large enough budget to employ a crane and hundreds of yards of dolly track so that his camera could prowl through the creamy corridors of the vast set.  (The dolls' house cost one-half million dollars, an enormous sum in 1963 -- Corman was able to make three of his opulent Poe films, and in England to boot, for that sum on money.)  Hiebert is terrified of the thirty or so girls in the boarding house and repeatedly tries to flee but the women stop him. The movie has a dizzying mise-en-abyme aspect when a documentary TV show appears at the house, complete with a fruity BBC-style "presenter." to depict Madam Wellon-Melon's academy.  At this point, the movie goes completely off the tracks and indulges itself in perverse dance numbers and various skits that have no real relationship to anything preceding them in the movie -- this part of the picture is depicted as a "variety show" staged by Hiebert and the girls for the amusement of the camera crew.  (There's a lion that stalks around the house and a forbidden chamber in which a black-clad dominatrix hangs upside down from the ceiling like a huge spider - she's got the long legs of an arachnid or Cyd Charisse and she performs an extended dance number to big band accompaniment, slinking around threatening Lewis who here appears as a sort of nerdy ballerina -- it's like a completely unhinged Gene Kelly ballet, a bit like "The Broadway Melody" sequence in Singin' in the Rain, but, infinitely, inferior.)  Even on its own terms, the movie makes no sense at all -- Hiebert is depicted as a monster of infantile destructiveness; he breaks everything he touches and, of course, is another of Lewis' spastically twitching deplorables.  Therefore, it's completely inexplicable that the women would need (or want) him around the house.  He seems to be completely useless -- but the girls and Mrs. Wellon-Mellon and, even, her competent factotum, played by the great Kathleen Freeman (also excellent as the Dean's secretary in The Nutty Professor) all want the moron to remain at the Boarding House.  None of this can be explained -- even dream logic will not suffice.  The Ladies' Man is full of desperately unfunny exchanges of dialogue, sight-gags that just consist of Lewis wrecking everything in sight -- it's utterly bizarre and completely devoid of anything that I could recognize as humor.  In fact, the film seems panicked in its attempts to amuse the audience.  It's got flop-sweat all over it -- and, literally, in one scene in which Lewis' Hiebert battles a collapsing bed; when he turns his back to the camera, we see that sweat has soaked through the back of his night shirt.  But, apparently, audiences in 1962 ate up this stuff and applauded the movie as hilarious.  Tastes change, I suppose.  Of course, seeing a Laff Riot alone in your house on Cable TV is a vastly different experience from what you encounter in a movie palace with a big screen.

There is stuff in both movies that can't be explained:  why does Dr. Gelp have a watch that loudly plays the Marine Anthem when it is opened?  Why does the potion first turn Gelp into a sort of hairy-armed werewolf?  What is poor George Raft doing in The Ladies' Man, appearing in a cameo in which he is mercilessly abused and humiliated by Herbert Hiebert?  If you can figure these things out, please let me know.