|
The Absent-Minded Professor |
Review by |
||||||||||
|
Director: Robert Stevenson
Walt Disney, 1961 |
|||||||||||
| 96 minutes | May 2008 | ||||||||||
| |
|||||||||||
|
The applications shown for flubber are bouncing balls, shoe soles, and with controlled minimal radiation a generalized lifting device. The basketball game, with shoes modified by flubber, is bouncing if not uplifting comedy; and since Brainard also is a good practical engineer, it's sweet to see the venerable Model T Ford take to the air. (I trust I give away no surprises, since both of these applications appear on the movie posters and cover sleeves.) By the way, as in some other contemporary films, you might notice that almost all the cars significantly in view are Fords good active advertising. The time and practice allowed for learning how to use flubber is skimpy, but reasonable to keep the action within cinematic bounds. The Wright Brothers were the aerial inventors who grasped that they'd have to teach themselves how to fly any airplane they got in the air. Flubber presents its own learning problems, and I particularly like these sequences. The specific bouncing-ball application was handled rather more scientifically a few years earlier in Walter S. Tevis' story, "The Big Bounce". Fred MacMurray as Professor Brainard is excellent as usual, and Keenan Wynn as the hostile businessman Alonzo Hawk is outstanding. The pace is good and the sight-gags come fast. Well worth watching.
|
|||||||||||
|
|
© 2008 Robert Wilfred Franson |
||||||||||
|
but with the central words so closely spaced a word-formation style common since The Absent-Minded Professor is the form now printed for covers and catalogues. |
|||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||