Monday, 1st APRIL 2002 WHAT’S UP DOC?:
featuring: THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1963) Professor Julius Kelp (Lewis) is a cartoonish 98-pound weakling with buck teeth & crooked geek glasses -- the black-rimmed kind that have actually become cool today. Despite the fact that he blows up his classroom with alarming regularity, which you'd think might deter bullies, he gets pushed around and locked in storage closets by football-player students. Apretty coed, Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens) finally inspires Kelp to toughen himself up to impress her. The gym does no good, however, so after failing the old-fashioned way to turn himself cool, he goes for the modern approach: chemistry. He develops a secret formula that, when ingested, turns him into... Dean Martin. Or someone very like. “ Buddy Love”, as Kelp's alter ego dubs himself,is a wild and popular party animal, who isn't afraid to talk to Stella anymore. There's one problem-the potion wears off quickly. Here is the best acting in the film, as Lewis is cold, arrogant, even violent, but knows how to turn on the charm. The transformation to Buddy Love without benefit of special effects (unless eight pounds of Brylcreem counts as a special effect) is pulled off masterfully.
His interludes as Buddy are less played for laughs but worked for me in a way that the over the top comedy attempts did not. Buddy is the height of early 60s fashion in a powder-blue sharkskin suit, pink shirt, and black tie. Suddenly "the kids" (the actors portraying them seem to be pushing 40; some of them are balding, fer pete's sake) - think he all that. Buddy starts haunting The Purple Pit - the squarest student hangout ever seen, tinkling the piano keys, singing in his squeaky, high-pitched voice, & generally comporting himself a lounge lizard with a nasty hangover. "He's like too much," one girl sighs, "one of the great swingers of all time," says another. He's an obnoxious, greasy jerk... and they love him for it.
Directed by Lewis, written by Lewis & Bill Richmond, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR swings wildly between obvious humor - long scenes of Lewis merely making goofy faces; Kelp's arms stretched out like Plastic Man's when he drops a barbell to the floor - and more subtle attempts at parody, like the Martin impersonation, or satire, like Buddy's over-the-top macho act trying to woo Stella. She is as Jekyll-and-Hydish as Kelp, prissy & pigtailed in class,yet vampish and dressed to kill at The Purple Pit. The "romantic" scene in which Stella - simultaneously repelled by and inexplicably attracted to Buddy – (her "no" means "yes," she supposedly doesn't really want to refuse his advances,) felt merely repugnant, not to mention horribly dated. Buddy is Kelp's overreaction to being bullied, of course, and Stella sees something of the sweet, if befuddled, Kelp in Buddy. But I never saw it. Ironically, the film works more on a dramatic level than a comedic one. Julius Kelp is a tragic figure, not a funny one. His speech at the end of the film is heart-rending and put the last footprint on any chance of this being real comedy. Buddy is the outcast desperately trying to be what he considers cool and significant. In an interesting aside, Lewis is said to have hated portraying Buddy, which makes sense since Buddy is inherently unlikable. The supporting cast features the immortal Howard Morris as Kelp's father & Kathleen Freeman as the young-at-heart secretary.
LA FOLIE DU DOCTEUR TUBE aka: THE MADNESS OF DOCTOR TUBE (1915) A Brilliant chrome-domed scientist sniffs cocaine in his lab whilst experimenting with the dissolution of light waves,then goes nuts when he accidentally discovers a way of transforming the real into images. His perlimpinpin powder, fruit of a procedural mistake, changes objects and people into re-scaled undulating icons resembling distorted mirror reflections. But the Doc is frightened by his own invention, and he tries to undo the whole thing. Tube's experiments with the light-diffusing crystals give him a vision of the world that his brain cannot handle. Meddling with the properties of light could then be regarded as a metaphor for dabbling with forbidden knowledge - or developing a new technology - that had strayed into a realm beyond man's understanding or control. - One of the first mad scientists put on film, his insanity represented by the use of a distorting "amusement-park crazy-mirror" lens.
Warped mirrors and bizarre optical effects are used to illustrate the cokehead's trips. A highly advanced experimental comedy . The story provided the pretext for ABEL GANCE, who later became world-famous for his multi-screen masterpiece NAPOLEON (1927), to introduce distorted mirror images (similar to anamorphic "stretching"), placing his film in the tradition of the early trick film, rather than the precusor to the French avant-garde, as claimed by Henri Langlois. On completion, Nalpas, the producer, did not think that the film would be well-received in France, which was at war at the time, and did not put it into circulation. It was, nonetheless, a major influence on the avant-garde movement. Prod: Louis Nalpas Films d'Art. Dir. Scen. ABEL GANCE. Phot. Wentzel, Lèonce-Henry Burel. Cast: Albert Dieudonné, Séverin-Mars. 11 mins. NFVLS.
THE ICED HOPES OF DR CALASTEIN (1981) Mad Doctor Calastein returns to his underground laboratory to continue work on his beloved virus. A day not unlike any other, and yet today is different. Somehow things have gone too far, and those outside and above think its time to have a few words with ol’ Calastein. Prod Co: Sydney Filmmakers Co-op. Dir: John Evan Hughes, Bruce Currie. 4 mins. AAC.. NIKOLA TESLA (1970) A biography of inventor and electrical genius NIKOLA TESLA. Although never actually having attained a Doctorate, TESLA pioneered the field of High Voltage, High Frequency AC transmission, and made many discoveries and inventions in the development of radio broadcasting, remote control and power generation, including the system of wireless power tansmission. 17 mins. NFVLS.
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