The Absent-Minded Professor
1961 | Not Rated | Comedy, Family | d. Robert Stevenson
Fred MacMurray, Nancy Olson, Keenan Wynn
In this beloved Disney romp, Fred MacMurray plays a tinkering science professor who formulates a rubbery anti-gravity substance he dubs “Flubber,” which he uses to save the college basketball team and to convert his old jalopy into a flying machine. Trouble ensues when the Defense Department gets wind of the invention and a corrupt businessman (the wonderful Keenan Wynn) determines to steal it for profit. MacMurray is perfect as the vague but well-intentioned garage inventor and Plaza Classic special guest Nancy Olson is his long-waiting fiancé. What better way to see his Flubber-powered car sailing against the backdrop of a full moon than on the Plaza’s giant screen? - TS
The Disney film features most of the hallmarks of the live-action comedies to follow: campus setting, wacky inventions, flustered authority figures and opportunistic officials, a villainous Keenan Wynn (in the first of three portrayals of Alonzo Hawk), and the use of character actors, creating a Disney stock company after the end of the studio system (Alan Hewitt, Edward Andrews, Leon Ames, and the great Ed Wynn, among others). Nancy Olson is warmly patient and Fred MacMurray more nuanced than most of the Disney heroes to follow. The comic policemen, played by James Westerfield and Forrest Lewis, are actually hold-overs from the first live-action Disney comedy, The Shaggy Dog. Flubber, though fantastic, feels less farfetched than the subsequent alien cats and football playing mules, and Medfield feels like an actual, quaint college town. - AL