Milton Frome

A bumbling, yet loveable, med student leaves medical school because of his neurotic sympathy pains that he shares with his patients. He takes a job at an exclusive posh sanitarium as an orderly. While he makes great efforts to be a model orderly, his good natured innate ineptness makes a shambles of the institution and tries the patience of the hospital staff. The harder he tries, the worse he makes things with sidesplitting funny results. While at the hospital, a significant figure from his long ago teenage past resurfaces. The results will have you in a flight of emotions from drama to slapstick to pathos. Only Jerry Lewis could pull this off in one of his best film works. Look for the wonderful Alice Pearce ("Gladys Kravtiz" of Bewitched) in the role as the hilarious hypochondriac "Mrs. Fuzzybee." Her scenes with Jerry are the funniest in the entire film.

Professor Julius Kelp is a nerdy, scruffy, buck-toothed, accident-prone, socially awkward university professor whose experiments in the classroom laboratory are unsuccessful and highly destructive. When a football-playing bully embarrasses and attacks him, Kelp decides to "beef up" by joining a local gym. Kelp's lack of physical strength leads him to seek a solution in his specialty of chemistry. He invents a serum that turns him into Buddy Love: a handsome, suave, charming and brash girl-chasing hipster. This new personality gives him the self-confidence to pursue one of his students, Stella Purdy. Although she resents Love, she finds herself strangely attracted to him. Buddy wows the crowd with his jazzy, breezy musical delivery and poised demeanor at the Purple Pit, a nightclub where the students hang out. He also mocks a bartender and waitress and punches a student. The formula wears off at inopportune times, often to Kelp's humiliation. Although Kelp knows that his alternate persona is a bad person, he cannot prevent himself from continually taking the formula as he enjoys the attention that Love receives. As Buddy performs at the annual student dance the formula starts to wear off. His real identity now revealed, Kelp gives an impassioned speech, admitting his mistakes and seeking forgiveness. Kelp says that the one thing he learned from being someone else is that if you don't like yourself, you can't expect others to like you. Purdy meets Kelp backstage, and confesses that she prefers Kelp over Buddy Love. Eventually, Kelp's formerly timid father chooses to market the formula (a copy of which Kelp had sent to his parents' home for safekeeping), endorsed by the deadpan president of the university who proclaims, "It's a gasser!" Kelp's father makes a pitch to the chemistry class, and the students all rush forward to buy the new tonic. In the confusion Kelp and Purdy slip out of the class. Armed with a marriage license and two bottles of the formula, they elope. During the short closing credits, each of the characters comes out and bows down to the camera, and when Jerry Lewis, still portraying Kelp, comes out and bows, he trips and goes into the camera, breaking it and causing the picture to go black.

A TV repairman dreams of being a detective and sets out to locate a missing heir. Lester is a clumsy and awkward TV repair man who is nevertheless gifted technically. In helping out a friend, he is drawn into a mystery involving a missing heir in a rich family. He begins to notice little things, like how much those family portraits look like him. Surely..no..he can't be...can he ? —David Gibson <djg6@ukc.ac.uk>

The weirdest alien of the galaxy pays a visit to Earth... Jerry Lewis is Kreton, a childish alien who, against his teacher's will leaves his planet to visit the Earth, and lands in the backyard of a famous television journalist who doesn't believe in U.F.O's and aliens. Wanting to study humans but not able to fully understand them, Kreton makes a mess out of it, generating a lot of comic situations. —Alessio Quirino

Sidney Pythias is a bumbling janitor picked up by cop Mike Damon as a teenage gang member worth saving from delinquency. With Damon's help, Sidney works his way through the Police Academy to become a cop too.