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

As with flubber itself, the professor's absorption in his experiments threatens to bounce his fiancee into the arms of a rival. The romantic difficulties are nicely dovetailed with the scientific and collegiate themes.

The applications shown for flubber are bouncing balls, shoe soles, and — with controlled minimal radiation — a generalized lifting device. The anticipated collegiate 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 for an automobile manufacturer, even for non-flying models.
  

The time and practice allowed by the plot for learning how to use flubber surely is inadequate for a break-through discovery, but reasonable to keep the action within cinematic bounds. Among the pioneers of powered heavier-than-air flight, the Wright Brothers with their hands-on practical bicycle experience 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: good fun throughout, and thoughtfully developed. Well worth watching.

© 2008 Robert Wilfred Franson

  
A spaced-out note on our movie's title:
the 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 non-Scottish
movie titles.

The Absent-Minded Professor

is the form now printed for covers and catalogues.