General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Nutty Professor (1963 film)

The Nutty Professor is a 1963 American comedy film directed, co-written by, and starring Jerry Lewis as Professor Julius Kelp, a timid chemistry teacher whose potion transforms him into the suave but obnoxious Buddy Love. It adapts Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a campus comedy, co-stars Stella Stevens, and is widely regarded as the high point of Lewis's career as a director-star.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	Premiered 2 July 1963 at the Academy Award Theater in Hollywood; New York opening 14 July 1963²
Runtime and format	107 minutes, Technicolor, sound; copyright registered 4 June 1963 (LP25315)²
Key personnel	Director and co-writer Jerry Lewis (with Bill Richmond); producer Ernest D. Glucksman; cinematographer W. Wallace Kelley; music Walter Scharf¹^•²
Dual role	Jerry Lewis as Professor Julius Kelp and his alter ego Buddy Love, the star attraction at the Purple Pit nightclub³
Box office	About $230,000 in its opening week in Los Angeles and $3.3 million in rentals over the following six months²
Recognition	Named to the National Film Registry in 2004; 80% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (30 reviews)⁴^•⁵
Legacy	Remade in 1996 by Universal with Eddie Murphy, directed by Tom Shadyac, with Lewis as executive producer²

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens at the fictional Matthews College, where science professor Julius Kelp clashes repeatedly with the administration over his disastrous laboratory experiments. Kelp, with buck teeth, thick glasses, and a whiny voice, falls for a student, Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens). To make himself irresistible, he uses chemistry to transform into Buddy Love, a libidinous lounge performer who becomes the star attraction at the Purple Pit nightclub. The potion wears off at unpredictable and embarrassing moments, and Kelp cannot control the switches between his two personalities.³^•¹

The supporting cast includes Del Moore as Dr. Hamius R. Warfield, Kathleen Freeman as Millie Lemmon, Howard Morris as Father Kelp, and Med Flory and Norman Alden as football players. Les Brown and his Band of Renown appear as themselves, and the film's opening theme is "Stella by Starlight."¹^•³

Production

Lewis had toyed with the Jekyll and Hyde project for ten years, according to his own account, and began serious development after completing The Errand Boy (1961). He wanted the British actor John Williams for the college dean, but Williams dismissed the film as trash, so the role went to Del Moore, a television and radio announcer who had appeared with Lewis in Hollywood or Bust (1956).³

Shooting. In August 1962 Lewis and producer Ernest D. Glucksman established production headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, with principal photography scheduled to begin 1 October 1962 at Arizona State University in nearby Tempe. A full-page advertisement announced the actual start of photography on 9 October 1962, and the production ran into late December. Most of the film was shot in the studio, with exterior location work in Tempe.²^•³ Paramount censors removed a dream sequence featuring Stella Stevens in a bikini, and Lewis maintained a closed set for the Buddy Love scenes, which he kept secret.²^•³

Video assist. During filming, columnist Philip K. Scheuer described Lewis's monitor system, in which film cameras carried small television cameras that transmitted images to screens around the set, letting Lewis watch his own performance and those of the cast. The Directors Guild of America credits Lewis with pioneering video assist, for which he holds the patent.²^•⁶

Legal dispute. In January 1963 aspiring screenwriter Lor-Ann Land filed a $1.5 million plagiarism suit, claiming the film drew on her screenplay Treat Me Beat. The charge was dismissed, but the judge found Lewis might have entered a verbal contract, and the case was settled out of court.²

Release and reception

Lewis promoted the film aggressively, chartering an airplane for a six-week tour of twenty-four U.S. cities with a full musical contingent, giving at least two stage performances a day at indoor theaters and on drive-in concession-stand roofs; by the tour's end in New York he had made more than 770 appearances over seven weeks. The gamble paid off: The Nutty Professor became his most financially successful film to date.²^•³

Contemporary reviews were generally positive, though some critics dissented; a Cleveland Press review called the film "a waste of talent, a waste of superb color photography and a waste of time."²^•⁷ Howard Thompson of The New York Times described it as "a comical study, with an edge of pathos" and "the revelation of a superb actor," and critic Stuart Byron placed Lewis's comic vision alongside Chaplin's, Keaton's, and Laurel and Hardy's. Later assessments have been similarly strong: the film holds 80% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, and the Time Out Film Guide calls it a "surreal off-the-wall masterpiece."³^•⁵^•⁸

Buddy Love and Dean Martin

Critics immediately read Buddy Love, the boozing, womanizing lounge crooner, as a parody of Dean Martin, Lewis's former partner in a comedy duo that ended bitterly in 1956. The science-fiction encyclopedia SFE describes the character as "an imaginative act of spite against Lewis's former partner and co-star Dean Martin, recognizable even in this broad parody."⁹ The TCM essay offers a different reading: despite the surface resemblance to Martin's screen image, Love is closer to a dark side of Lewis himself, sanctimonious, narcissistic, and confrontational, glimpsed in his telethon appearances and later in Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1983). Common Sense Media similarly sees the character as a spoof of the whole early-1960s Rat Pack male ideal rather than one man.³^•¹⁰

Legacy

The film marked the feature debut of comedian Henry Gibson, later a regular on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and gave early opportunities to Richard Kiel and Francine York.²^•³ In 1996 Universal released a remake, also titled The Nutty Professor, based on the Lewis and Richmond screenplay, directed by Tom Shadyac and starring Eddie Murphy and Jada Pinkett Smith; Lewis served as executive producer on the remake and its 2000 sequel, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. Lewis announced a Broadway musical based on the 1963 film in 2006, but as of 2010 it remained unproduced.² The Museum of Modern Art exhibited John Lauris Jensen's storyboards for the film in 2018, noting that in no other Lewis film is the experience of being seen so central, with the onscreen audiences standing in for the moviegoing public.¹¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026