The Nutty Professor(1963)

After his first night as Buddy Love (where he performs at the Purple Pit nightclub and starts pursuing his student, Stella [Stella Stevens], until he is forced to abandon her without explanation when the formula starts to wear off), Julius (Jerry Lewis) realizes that, if this formula were to fall into the wrong hands, the consequences could be devastating. However, since it is much too complicated a formula to memorize and too vitally important to destroy, he decides to mail a copy of it to his henpecked, weak-willed father, Elmer (Howard Morris), and his overbearing mother, Edwina (Elvia Allman), because he feels that they are the only people that he can trust to keep it safe. He also decides to send them instructions with the formula stating that, should anything happen to him, they must send the copy of the formula and the original copy to Washington D.C. After getting the copy and the instructions together, he puts them in the mail.

Over time, Buddy Love becomes a popular figure among the university students, especially those who come to the Purple Pit to watch him sing, but in subsequent dates that he has with Stella, each date ends with him leaving her without explanation when he notices the first sign of Julius returning. Julius also finds that Buddy occasionally emerges when he is teaching his class. However, even though he knows that Buddy is not a nice person, Julius can’t resist taking the formula because he enjoys the attention that Buddy gets, plus Buddy is more handsome and confident than he is, and he even makes modifications to the formula to make it stronger so he can have more time as Buddy.

When the university’s senior prom comes up on the horizon, university president Dr. Warfield (Del Moore) has a meeting with the members of the prom’s entertainment committee one morning – two of whom are Julius and Stella – in order to go over the proposed list of entertainers for the event. Buddy gets suggested as an entertainer, and after a few of the student members of the committee praise him, Warfield asks the faculty members of the committee if any of them are familiar with Buddy, and Julius unintentionally tells him that he knows about him. When Warfield asks everyone else if they know Buddy and they don’t answer him, he tells everyone that he wants to meet Buddy face-to-face and instructs everyone in the committee to find him and have him meet him in his office at 3:00 this afternoon. Stella informs Warfield that they don’t exactly know how to get in touch with him, but Julius tells him that he can find a way to contact Buddy and get him to meet with him, which Stella finds strange. Later on, Julius takes the formula and meets with Warfield as Buddy at the appointed time, and Buddy manages to charm him into letting him entertain the students. Later on, Warfield officially sends Buddy an invitation to the senior prom, but he also sends a memo out to Julius telling him that he must attend the event as a chaperone.

Julius shows up first to do his chaperone duties, and while he is getting some lemonade for Dr. Warfield and his secretary, Stella approaches him and invites him to dance with her. He accepts her invitation, and as they dance, he brings up how she must be looking forward to seeing Buddy tonight. She replies that she guesses that she is looking forward to seeing him, but can’t figure out why, and though she finds him good-looking, she also finds him rude, disrespectful, self-centered, and discourteous. When Julius then remarks that he heard that Buddy is quite talented, she replies that he is, but talent comes in many forms. She then tells him that she believes that intelligence is a greater talent than anything, and if Buddy has any real intelligence, he has a fantastic talent for keeping it hidden. Julius comments that, evidently, whatever she sees in Buddy, it must be very well buried, then suggests to her that maybe Buddy chooses to keep his inner man locked up so that no one steps on him. She replies that she doesn’t want to step on him, and maybe someday she will get to prove that to him, if he ever unlocks that inner man and lets him loose so that she can grab him and hold him.

After the song is over, the band leader says some things that makes Julius realize that Buddy Love’s set is coming up very soon, so he slips away from Stella when she gets distracted and heads to his office to prepare a new batch of the formula. He drinks it and transforms into Buddy again, and he gets out on stage in time for his performance. He sings one song for the crowd, but just as he starts to sing another song, the formula starts to wear off because he didn’t take enough of it to last his entire performance. However, rather than excuse himself to make another batch of it, he decides to let himself transform back into Julius in front of everyone so he can come clean to them, the faculty, and to Stella about what he has been up to. As he turns back, he explains to the crowd that he stumbled across something that enabled him to become Buddy, but he realizes now that he should have just left it alone, and while he had no control over what he said or did as Buddy, he is nonetheless sorry for how he acted and hopes that he hasn’t hurt anyone. He also says that, while he has come to accept that he doesn’t want to be something that he is not, he was glad that he got to be somebody else because the experience taught him something that he never knew: You may as well like yourself, because you have to spend your entire life with yourself, and if you don’t think too much of yourself, you can’t expect others to. He then walks off the stage, in parting apologizing to Dr. Warfield and telling him that he likes it here at the university very much, and he hopes that, after he hears all the facts, he won’t think too terribly wrong of him and kick him out of the university.

Stella goes backstage to find Julius and finds him sitting on a chair and sulking, and she tells him that she understands that just being one person is more than enough for any human being to handle. She also tells him that she wouldn’t ever want to spend the rest of her life with anyone like Buddy, and remarks that being the wife of a professor would be much more normal and much happier. She then shares a kiss with him.

In the next scene, we see Julius teaching his class again, and we see that he is now wearing braces to fix his overbite and has started to style his hair better. Suddenly, his parents come into his classroom, and we see that Elmer is strangely displaying a far more confident but loud and obnoxious personality while Edwina has become submissive. After giving his son an obnoxious greeting, Elmer shows off to the students that he has used Julius’ formula to create Kelp’s Kool Tonic (much to Julius’ shock), and he tells them that this will help turn them into more confident people like himself. As the students swarm to him to buy the tonic, Stella pulls Julius out of the classroom and into the hallway. Julius asks her what he is going to do and what his father has done, and she replies that she knows what HE will do, then asks him if he has their marriage license. He pulls it out of his lab coat and shows it to her, and when she asks him what he is waiting for, he once again expresses great concern about the formula and about his parents. She replies that what’s done is done, and they have their own lives to live, and she lastly encourages him to leave with her. Julius agrees with her, but as they go, Stella breaks the fourth wall by turning her head to look towards the audience and winking, and we see that she has grabbed two bottles of the tonic and tucked them into the back of her pants.