The Nutty Professor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The “inner man” Prof. Julius Kelp releases from himself through chemical means is the rude, unspeakably conceited Buddy Love—not a good inner man.  Julius, a college chemistry teacher, fails to realize this, and never expects Stella (Stella Stevens) to fall for him.  We don’t expect it either; he’s a nutty professor—played with farcical adroitness by Jerry Lewis in the Lewis classic, The Nutty Professor (1963).

However, the movie ends on a dandy note by having Julius and Stella walk off to get married as Stella, unknown to her fiance, bears on her belt two bottles of the weird chemical that turned Julius into masculine Buddy.  Sincerely wanting the qualities of Prof. Kelp, she also wants, I would say,—for Julius—some of the qualities of Buddy Love.

Lewis’s film is a sassy, leisurely, corny delight—with “some scenes that can hold their own with the classic silent comedies” (Pauline Kael).  One such scene contains a tracking shot of people on the street looking astonished at an unseen, very, very cool Buddy.  Another shows, in a flashback, Julius’s darkly, grimly funny parents while goofy baby Julius is in a nearby playpen. . . Stella Stevens fills the bill as the lady-love, and is youthfully beautiful.  Del Moore, as the college president, and Howard Morris, as the professor’s father, are successful as well, hilariously right.

In ’63, The Nutty Professor may have been the best American comedy since Pillow Talk.

Cover via Amazon

If it is a Christian who is baptized (excluding the infants), the baby donkey baptized by children in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) is a Christian—or, rather, a “Christian.”  He is a “Christian” in the sense of a suffering servant—“an epitome of passive suffering,” says Vernon Young.  He is frightened and scorned and abused by men, while, on the other hand, a girl named Marie (Anne Wiazemsky) loves him as a pet.  But Balthazar, the donkey, is removed from Marie, and Marie—virtually the Mary Magdalene of the film—removes herself from respectable company.  Not only does she love the vile hoodlum Gerard (Francois Lafarge), she also resorts to prostitution.  Balthazar must live with the earthy, earthly reality.  Marie chooses to live with, to embrace, the worldly.

Its flaws keep Au Hasard Balthazar (At Random, Balthazar) from being as powerful as it could be.  All the same, it manages to be one of the good movies of Robert Bresson (unlike those he made in the Seventies), a profound Christian opus acknowledging that there is Christological truth in the natural world.  It also conveys that the sufferer is superior to the sinner, albeit Marie too, after sinning, suffers.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Funny Face

With savvy and imagination Stanley Donen directed the musical, Funny Face (1957), wherein a book store clerk (Audrey Hepburn) is rapidly turned into a fashion model.

Early on, the movie’s appeal is perfectly evident:  Hepburn passably sings a pop masterpiece, “How Long Has This Been Going On?,” by George and Ira Gershwin.  After that, well, it’s strange to see the young Hepburn fall in love with the middle-aged Fred Astaire, and Hepburn’s dancing is sheerly mechanical in the café scene, but the good stuff keeps rolling nonetheless.  Astaire charms us with another top-notch Gershwin song from the Twenties (terpsichore included)—“Let’s Kiss and Make Up.”  And, yes, even though Hepburn’s singing voice is sometimes less than passable, her acting is gracefully decent, properly amusing.

Cover of Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)

The novel Stoner (1965), by John Williams, chronicles the life of William Stoner, a farm boy sent to college where he falls in love with literature before becoming an adept English professor.  This is in the early part of the 20th century, during which Stoner does not enlist to fight in the First World War.  Drawn to a woman named Edith, he courts and marries her—one of the worst wives in American literature, and not much of a mother either.  The couple have a fragile daughter, Grace.  Gradually Stoner enters an affair with an attractive student, but is also deprived of it before long.  The passage in which he learns of the student’s feelings for him is superbly written.

An unfortunate fact in Stoner is that an academic career is used to support such sordid realities as Stoner’s ugly marriage and the abetment of a deplorable grad student protected by a vindictive colleague.  Human meanness encircles the scholar, although when Grace mentions that things have not been easy for him, he admits, “I suppose I didn’t want them to be.”  He says this before he dies of cancer, a disease which merely becomes Stoner’s last enemy, as Edith and the vindictive colleague are his enemies.  But none of these enemies does he hate.  They create conditions to which he becomes resigned.  Over and above, the novel implies that if a man can be resigned to (non-lethal) human enemies, he can be resigned to inevitable death.

The book’s description of the moments before this death is memorable, set forth in what has been considered a lost classic.