The Nutty Professor

The Nutty Professor (1963) is the cult Jerry Lewis comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Lewis both directs and stars as Julius Kelp, a clumsy, nearsighted chemistry teacher whose students mock him and whose lab experiments tend to explode. One humiliation too many sends him looking for a chemical fix.

Kelp brews a potion, gulps it down, and out of the smoke steps Buddy Love — a slick, swaggering, velvet-voiced ladykiller who instantly charms his student Stella (Stella Stevens) and owns every room he walks into. The catch: the formula keeps wearing off at the worst possible moments, forcing Buddy to bolt before anyone sees him shrink back into the scrawny professor. It's Jekyll and Hyde flipped inside out and played as broad farce.

To this day many read Buddy Love as a wicked send-up of Lewis's old partner Dean Martin. The film was later added to the U.S. National Film Registry as a culturally significant work, and the 1996 Eddie Murphy remake proved how durable the premise is. If you love vintage screen comedy where one performer carries two opposite roles, this is the gold standard. Stream The Nutty Professor (1963) online on iFILM.