Princeton mathematics doctoral candidate Catherine Boyd and her hyper-critical British fiancé, experimental psychologyprofessor James Moreland, enter a nearby garage after their car breaks down. Ed Walters, a science-fiction hobbyist mechanic, falls in love with Catherine at first sight and is blatantly enthralled by her, which she pointedly ignores.
Inside the garage, Ed excitedly tells his fellow mechanics that he envisions their future together, their marriage and kids. Catherine comes in and, rattled by Ed's attention, jumbles her words, but he understands her perfectly. Finding a watch that Catherine accidentally left, Ed goes to her address, coming face to face with Albert Einstein, Catherine's uncle. Albert and his mischievous friends, scientists Nathan Liebknecht, Kurt Gödel and Boris Podolsky, accept Ed as a friend after he answers a philosophical question about time and retrieves one of their badminton rackets from a tree.
Ed tells them that when he and Catherine met, time slowed down and he had a moment of clarity. The scientists see him as someone better suited for her. Ed takes Einstein to the university on his motorcycle to find Catherine. Although unsuccessful in getting a date with her, he makes her laugh. At a university dinner, James and Catherine discuss their differing views. He describes an academic and intellectual experience for their honeymoon. In contrast, she describes a sensual one in Hawaii. James pulls her aside, berating her, so she accuses him of not loving her. Catherine arrives home and tells Albert about James's plan for them: He will be a full professor at Stanford, while she is resigned to being a homemaker and full-time mother.
The four scientists have Ed's garage transform their car into a convertible, brainstorming about how Ed can pique Catherine's interest. Ed, who barely got through high school, jokingly asks to "borrow their brains", inspiring them to give him a makeover and portray him as a hidden genius. They take a paper about cold fusion that Albert wrote in 1925 but never published because he could not get the math to work, and they pose it as a concept developed by Ed. Catherine finds Ed apparently discussing his idea of a nuclear fusion space shuttle engine with them. She talks him into presenting its paper at a symposium at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.
Ed stumbles through his memorized presentation, and they get away with it. At a reception afterward, the scientists bring Catherine and Ed together alone under the stars. When James arrives, Albert feigns a heart attack, asking Catherine and Ed to drive him home for his pills, then produces them from his pocket. The three stop at a café to get out of the rain. Catherine senses Ed's feelings for her and tries to leave, but Albert distracts her. Playing a waltz on the jukebox, he has Ed cut in. They briefly dance but suddenly leave when she remembers that James is expecting her.
James challenges Ed in front of the press to do a very public set of intelligence tests. After solving the manual puzzles quickly, Ed is subjected to 50 questions on advanced physics. The four scientists in the audience easily solve the questions and prompt him with the answers. As a result, he is rated with an I.Q. of 186. The discovery of genius Ed is published in the newspapers and cinema newsreels, pleasing Catherine. However, going over calculations in Ed's (actually Albert's) paper, she sees something that is off and approaches her uncle. Albert causes her to doubt her suspicions to protect the ruse. Catherine becomes distraught, but before she leaves, Ed insists that she is more intelligent than she believes.
Uncle Albert arranges for a small sailing excursion with James, Catherine, Ed and himself, but the scientists detain James so that he does not show. Albert, steering the boat, sneakily knocks her off balance so that she falls into Ed's lap. Catherine, struggling to come to grips with her feelings, finally says that she loves him, and they kiss.
At the garage, Ed admits to his co-workers that he still has not told Catherine the truth. At the same time, she realizes that it was all a lie. President Eisenhower arrives, pleased with the supposed nuclear fusion engine that will overtake a rumored project similar to a Russian project. On his motorcycle, Ed catches up with the presidential motorcade and meets Catherine in a field. She scolds him but realizes that the president and his staff believe that he is proposing. Flustered, she tells him to kiss her. He does and tells her that she had fallen in love with him at first sight also, but that they had to devise the ruse to convince her. Catherine slaps him and returns to the motorcade.
Realizing that she has learned of the ruse, Albert admits to Catherine that she has finally seen through the "intellectual Ed" ruse. He congratulates her on mathematically disproving his theory of 30 years ago, something that he could not do because he is terrible at math. This further reinforces Catherine's self-confidence. At the symposium, James accuses Albert Einstein and Ed Walters of fraud, but Albert turns the tables on him. He says that "Operation Red Cabbage" was their plan to prove that the Russians were lying about their nuclear fusion advances in space, and that Catherine Boyd and Ed Walters were key in proving it.
Albert is rushed to the hospital for a real emergency and asks Catherine at his bedside to listen to her heart and not let her head keep her from love. Ed arrives, apologizes to Catherine and leaves, telling her that he hopes that one day, she will realize that she is extraordinary. A comet is due on the night of April 1. Catherine goes to Stargazers' Field to view it and sees Ed already there. They watch the comet together and Catherine admits that she has fallen for Ed.
For dramatic reasons, I.Q. fictionalizes the lives of certain real people. Albert Einstein did not have a niece by the name of Catherine Boyd. Kurt Gödel was famously shy and reclusive,[2] unlike his fictional counterpart in this film. The movie gives the impression that Einstein and his friends are all around the same age, when in fact, they were between 17 and 30 years younger than Einstein.[citation needed] The real Louis Bamberger died in 1944, before the film's set period.
The characters in the film listen to Little Richard's "Tutti-Frutti", which was released in November 1955, although Albert Einstein died the previous April.
Production
Director Fred Schepisi later said that although he liked the film, it was not what it could have been:
The problem was there were two other producers, there was a studio and there was Tim Robbins and they were all contributing, and Tim Robbins was being difficult because he said in the '90s nobody would like a character who has a woman fall in love with him because of a lie. That's the whole premise of the film. And it's all right for him to know that and believe it, but he should spend the whole time trying to say, "Hey, I'm lying to you," and be constantly frustrated. Because of that attitude, he pulled the film this way, he pulled it that way while we were writing and it just felt messy. And nobody ever understood the value of those four scientists, and I like the cast that I had, but the other three scientists apart from Walter Matthau were originally going to be Peter Ustinov, Barry Humphries and John Cleese. I wanted them all the way through, but nobody understood how strong they would be. Nobody understood that with a garage and the scientists and this other guy, if you could just stay within that world, if you kept your two lovers together all the time under pressure and you do lots of silly things—there were a couple of wonderfully silly things when they were trying to prove his theory and they kept blowing things up—it had that whimsy about it that would have kept the lovers together and under tension. If they want subplots, they up the stakes and all this formulaic crap - and that's the problem.[3]
Reception
I.Q. opened in theaters on Christmas Day. It grossed $3,131,201 during its opening weekend, ranking eighth at the US box office.[4] By the time that the film closed, it had grossed $26,381,221 in the United States and Canada.[5] It grossed $47 million worldwide.[1]
The film received mixed reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, I.Q. holds a 45% rating, based on 29 reviews.[6]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3½ stars out of 4, with glowing praise of Walter Matthau's performance. "Matthau as Einstein is a stroke of casting genius. He looks uncannily like the great mathematician. Whether he acts like him I am not in a position to say, but he certainly doesn't act like himself: He has left all his Matthauisms behind, and created this performance from scratch, and it's one of the year's genuine comic gems. He deserves an Oscar nomination."[7]
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held as one of the most influential scientists. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel profoundly influenced scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, building on earlier work by Frege, Richard Dedekind, and Georg Cantor.
Walter Matthau was an American screen and stage actor, known for his "hangdog face" and for playing world-weary characters. He starred in 10 films alongside his real-life friend Jack Lemmon, including The Odd Couple (1968) and Grumpy Old Men (1993). The New York Times called this "one of Hollywood's most successful pairings". Among other accolades, he was an Academy Award, a two-time BAFTA Award, and two-time Tony Award winner.
Mileva Marić, sometimes called Mileva Marić-Einstein, was a Serbian physicist and mathematician. She showed intellectual aptitude from a young age and studied at Zürich Polytechnic in a highly male dominated field, after having studied medicine for one semester at Zürich University. Her studies included differential and integral calculus, descriptive and projective geometry, mechanics, theoretical physics, applied physics, experimental physics, and astronomy. One of her study colleagues at university was her future husband Albert Einstein, to whose early work Marić is thought by some to have contributed.
Charley Varrick is a 1973 American neo-noir crime film directed by Don Siegel and starring Walter Matthau, Andrew Robinson, Joe Don Baker and John Vernon. Charley Varrick is based on the novel The Looters by John H. Reese, and is the first of four consecutive films in which Matthau appeared that were not comedies.
King Creole is a 1958 American musical drama film directed by Michael Curtiz and based on the 1952 novel A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins. Produced by Hal B. Wallis, the film stars Elvis Presley, Carolyn Jones, Walter Matthau, Dolores Hart, Dean Jagger, Vic Morrow, Liliane Montevecchi and Paul Stewart, and it follows a nineteen-year-old (Presley) who gets mixed up with crooks and involved with two women.
Grumpy Old Men is a 1993 American romantic comedy film directed by Donald Petrie, written by Mark Steven Johnson, and starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ann-Margret, Burgess Meredith, Daryl Hannah, Kevin Pollak, Ossie Davis, Buck Henry and Christopher McDonald. It was followed by the sequel Grumpier Old Men.
Out to Sea is a 1997 American romantic comedy film directed by Martha Coolidge and written by Robert Nelson Jacobs. It is the final film role of Donald O'Connor, Gloria DeHaven and Edward Mulhare, and the penultimate film of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as a film duo.
Nobody Lives Forever is a 1946 American crime film noir directed by Jean Negulesco and based on the novel I Wasn't Born Yesterday by W. R. Burnett. It stars John Garfield and Geraldine Fitzgerald and features Walter Brennan, Faye Emerson, George Coulouris and George Tobias.
Einstein's Brain is a 1994 documentary by Kevin Hull following Japanese professor Kenji Sugimoto in his search for Albert Einstein's brain. It is produced by BBC Films.
Cactus Flower is a 1969 American screwball comedy film directed by Gene Saks, and starring Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman and Goldie Hawn, who won an Academy Award for her performance.
Albert Einstein has been the subject of many works of popular culture.
The Kentuckian is a 1955 American CinemaScope Western film directed by Burt Lancaster, who also stars. This is one of only two films that Lancaster directed, and the only one for which he has sole credit. It is Walter Matthau's film debut. The film is an adaptation of the novel The Gabriel Horn by Felix Holt. The film was shot in locations around Kentucky, including Cumberland Falls, the Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park near London, Owensboro and Green River, and at the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Village near Rockport, Indiana. A featured landmark is the natural arch Sky Bridge.
Einstein and Eddington is a British single drama produced by Company Pictures and the BBC, in association with HBO. It featured David Tennant as British scientist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, and Andy Serkis as Albert Einstein. This is the story of Einstein's general theory of relativity, his relationship with Eddington and the introduction of this theory to the world, against the backdrop of the Great War and Eddington's eclipse observations.
You're Telling Me! is a 1934 pre-Code comedy film directed by Erle C. Kenton and starring W.C. Fields. It is a remake of the silent film So's Your Old Man (1926), also starring Fields. Both films are adapted from the story Mr. Bisbee’s Princess by Julian Leonard Street. It was released by Paramount Pictures.
The Heiress is a 1947 play by American playwrights Ruth and Augustus Goetz adapted from the 1880 Henry James novel Washington Square. Two years later, the play was adapted into the film The Heiress starring Olivia de Havilland.
Loveria is a 2013 Bengali action comedy romance film. It was directed by Raja Chanda and produced under the banner of Shree Venkatesh Films and Surinder Films. It is a remake of the 2009 Telugu film Bumper Offer starring Sairam Shankar and Bindu Madhavi.
Working Girls is a 1931 American pre-Code drama film directed by Dorothy Arzner and written by Zoë Akins, based on the play Blind Mice, written by Vera Caspary and Winifred Lenihan. The film stars Judith Wood, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Paul Lukas, Stuart Erwin, and Frances Dee. The film was released on December 12, 1931, by Paramount Pictures.
"The Gift of the Woodi" is the nineteenth episode of the seventh season of the American television sitcom, Cheers, written by Phoef Sutton and directed by James Burrows. It originally aired on April 6, 1989, on NBC. In this episode, Woody Boyd sings a self-penned song "Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly...", also called "The Kelly Song", as his birthday gift to his girlfriend Kelly Gaines. Cliff plans to popularize his invention "beetabaga", a vegetable hybrid of rutabaga and beetroot. Rebecca wants to downgrade her sexual appeal in attempt to impress her superiors. The song has been praised by the critics. It also was performed by a couple other performers and actor Woody Harrelson himself a few times, portrayer of Woody Boyd.
↑ Elliott, David (December 25, 1994). "On the big screen, color it a satisfying time". The San Diego Union-Tribune (1, 2ed.). p.E=8.
↑ P. Means, Sean (January 1, 1995). "'Pulp and Circumstance' After the Rise of Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood Would Never Be the Same". The Salt Lake Tribune (Finaled.). p.E1.
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