The Absent-Minded Professor
 

Director: Robert Stevenson
Writers: Bill Walsh, Samuel W. Taylor
Cast:

• Fred MacMurray — Professor Ned Brainard
• Nancy Olson — Betty Carlisle
• Keenan Wynn — Alonzo P. Hawk
• Tommy Kirk — Biff Hawk
• Elliott Reid — Professor Shelby Ashton

Walt Disney, 1961
black & white

  
The Absent-Minded Professor is a quite enjoyable science fiction film, with the science presented as gobbledygook but the comedy well plotted. Professor Brainard of Mayfield College has a chemistry experiment go successfully awry, rather in the manner of the discovery of the vulcanization of rubber. The serendipitous invention he names flubber, for flying rubber. It's got a lot of bounce, and if one is not careful, the rate of bounce gets out of control.

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

  
Note on the title:
the movie's title as displayed in the film footage itself, is:
The
Absent Minded
Professor

but with the central words so closely spaced
that it could be read as:
The
AbsentMinded
Professor

— a word-formation style common since
Apple's programs MacWrite and MacPaint,
but surely rare in movie titles.

The Absent-Minded Professor

is the form now printed for covers and catalogues.
  

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