Fred MacMurray Flies High in The Absent-Minded Professor

My dad is a college computer science instructor, and like me, he has a tendency to be a bit scatter-brained. Hence, it is not a stretch to label him an absent-minded professor. However, he's got nothing on Fred MacMurray's title character in the 1961 Robert Stevenson-directed Disney movie The Absent-Minded Professor.

Ned Brainard is a brilliant scientist who is always busy experimenting, both in class and out. He's been known to set off explosions in the classroom, and when he disappears into a perplexing problem, he may not emerge for hours. He becomes oblivious to everything else in his life. The extent of this tendency becomes apparent when we learn that Ned has missed his own wedding twice.

The film opens on his third wedding day, and you just know that something is going to come along to stop him from taking those vows. His fiancée, a secretary named Betsy Carlisle (Nancy Olson), is very patient with him, but how much heartache and frustration can a gal take? Can a man who can't remember the time and date of his own wedding really care that much about the bride?

The conflict in this movie is two-fold. Ned must attempt, in the wake of his latest misfire, to win Betsy's favor again, a quest made more difficult by the presence of English professor Shelby Ashton (Elliott Reid), her arrogant ex-boyfriend. He also needs to explore the reason for his absence: his discovery of an extraordinary substance he calls Flubber. This "flying rubber" has a remarkably buoyant quality that allows it to become bouncier and bouncier each time it hits the ground. What useful applications might this have for his university and even for the White House?

The Absent-Minded Professor falls firmly in the line of broad comedies that marked most of Disney's live-action output in the early 1960s. The movie is in black-and-white, which is always a disappointment to me, but it's still a lively romp of a film. The silly factor is as high as Ned's car, which soars over the treetops when he pours Flubber in the engine. While MacMurray does a convincing job of pretending he knows what he is talking about, I suspect there is very little real science in this movie.

MacMurray was one of Disney's stock stars, and he makes a thoroughly charming leading man. He always comes across as earnest, with a calm demeanor concealing a passionate soul. He's quirkier here than in many films, but such is the way of brilliant scientists, as anyone familiar with LOST's Daniel Faraday or Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper could tell you. With all those theories and formulas zooming around in Brainard's brain, there's just no room for small matters like remembering important dates and putting on matching socks.

While I do find Ned very likable and, being rather spacey myself, can mostly forgive his forgetfulness, I did find myself troubled by some of his tactics throughout the movie. Most egregiously, though he claims the ethical high road by refusing to pass one of the basketball team's star players, Biff Hawk, he goes on to apply Flubber to the shoes of everyone on the team, giving them an unfair advantage over the rivals.

Biff, incidentally, is portrayed by Tommy Kirk, another Disney standby perhaps best known for his starring role in Old Yeller. Here, he is the son of ruthless developer Alonzo Hawk (Keenan Wynn), who resurfaces in my favorite Herbie movie, Herbie Rides Again, as well as this movie's sequel. In a fun move, Keenan's father Ed, who I know best as the giggle-prone Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins, plays the fire chief tasked with bringing him down to earth when Ned tricks Alonzo into donning the Flubber shoes and jumping out the window.

While I don't always approve of Ned's antics here, The Absent-Minded Professor is an entertaining movie that gives me a better appreciation for how frustrating it can be for level-headed people to deal with a person like me who always has her head in the clouds - or in his case, his feet as well.