Best Comedy Movies of 1963

An unemployed construction worker heading out west stops at a remote farm in the desert to get water when his car overheats. The farm is being worked by a group of East European Catholic nuns, headed by the strict mother superior, who believes the man has been sent by God to build a much needed church in the desert.

A group of strangers come across a man dying after a car crash who proceeds to tell them about the $350,000 he buried in California. What follows is the madcap adventures of those strangers as each attempts to claim the prize for himself.

The trademark of The Phantom, a renowned jewel thief, is a glove left at the scene of the crime. Inspector Clouseau, an expert on The Phantom's exploits, feels sure that he knows where The Phantom will strike next and leaves Paris for the Tyrolean Alps, where the famous Lugashi jewel 'The Pink Panther' is going to be. However, he does not know who The Phantom really is, or for that matter who anyone else really is...

Ageing, wealthy, rancher and self-made man, George Washington McLintock is forced to deal with numerous personal and professional problems. Seemingly everyone wants a piece of his enormous farmstead, including high-ranking government men, McLintock's own sons and nearby Native Americans. As McLintock tries to juggle his various adversaries, his wife—who left him two years previously—suddenly returns. But she isn't interested in George; she wants custody of their daughter.

A very old woman wants to have dinner with her friends. As they are all dead, the butler has to play the role of every guest.

A timid, nearsighted chemistry teacher discovers a magical potion that can transform him into a suave and handsome Romeo. The Jekyll and Hyde game works well enough until the concoction starts to wear off at the most embarrassing times.

A magician who has been turned into a raven turns to a former sorcerer for help.

Tom loves Sophie and Sophie loves Tom. But Tom and Sophie are of differering classes. Can they find a way through the mayhem to be true to love?

Miss Marple and Mr. Stringer are witnesses to the death by heart attack of elderly, rich Mr. Enderby. Yet they have their doubts about what happened. The police don't believe them, thus leading Miss Marple to yet again investigate by herself.

'Guns' Donovan prefers carousing with his pals Doc Dedham and 'Boats' Gilhooley, until Dedham's high-society daughter Amelia shows up in their South Seas paradise.

Bugs is given a room for the night at the castle of Count Bloodcount in Transylvania.

A young Englishman dreams of escaping from his working class family and dead-end job as an undertaker's assistant. A number of indiscretions cause him to lie in order to avoid the penalties. His life turns into a mess and he has an opportunity to run away and leave it all behind.

An accident in the butchers shop leads Norman Pitkin and Mr Grimsdale to the hospital where, after causing the normal ammount of chaos, Pitkin finds Lindy, a little girl who hasn't spoken or smiled since her parents were killed in an aeroplane accident. Pitkin decides to help.

Angie Rossini, an innocent New York City sales clerk from a repressive Italian-American family, engages in a short-lived affair with a handsome jazz musician named Rocky Papasano. When Angie becomes pregnant, she tracks down Rocky hoping he'll pay for her abortion.

A housewife's sudden rise to fame as a soap spokesperson leads to chaos in her home life.

An English professor decides that there are too many useless people in the world and invents a gas that will kill them off. But first they'll at least have a good laugh.

Clay Spencer is a hard-working man who loves his wife and large family. He is respected by his neighbors and always ready to give them a helping hand. Although not a churchgoer, he even helps a newly arrived local minister regain his flock after he and Clay get into a bit of trouble. If he has one dream in life it's to build his wife Olivia a beautiful house on a piece of land he inherited on Spender's mountain. When his eldest son, Clayboy, graduates at the top of his high school class and has the opportunity to go to college, Clay has only one option left to him.

Disney musical about Mother Carey, a Bostonian widow and her three children who move to Maine. Postmaster Osh Popham helps them move into a run-down old house and fixes it up for them. It's not entirely uninhabited, though; the owner, a Mr. Hamilton, is a mysterious character away in Europe, but Osh assures them he won't mind their living there, since he won't be coming home for a long time yet. The children and a cousin who comes to live with them have various adventures before an unexpected visitor shows up

Three years into their loving marriage, with two infant daughters at home in Los Angeles, Nicholas Arden and Ellen Wagstaff Arden are on a plane that goes down in the South Pacific. Although most passengers manage to survive the incident, Ellen presumably perishes when swept off her lifeboat, her body never recovered. Fast forward five years. Nicholas, wanting to move on with his life, has Ellen declared legally dead. Part of that moving on includes getting remarried, this time to a young woman named Bianca Steele, who, for their honeymoon, he plans to take to the same Monterrey resort where he and Ellen spent their honeymoon. On that very same day, Ellen is dropped off in Los Angeles by the Navy, who rescued her from the South Pacific island where she was stranded for the past five years. She asks the Navy not to publicize her rescue nor notify Nicholas as she wants to do so herself.

Jerry Lewis plays Norman Phiffer, a proud man in a humble life, who doesn't know that his girlfriend, Barbara, is heir to the Tuttle Department Store dynasty. Mrs. Tuttle, Barbara's mother, is determined to split the two lovers, and hires Norman in an attempt to humiliate him enough that Barbara leaves him. Will she ruin their love, or will he ruin her store?

In 1944, Capt. Josiah J. Newman is the doctor in charge of Ward 7, the neuropsychiatric ward, at an Army Air Corps hospital in Arizona. The hospital is under-resourced and Newman scrounges what he needs with the help of his inventive staff, especially Cpl. Jake Leibowitz. The military in general is only just coming to accept psychiatric disorders as legitimate and Newman generally has 6 weeks to cure them or send them on to another facility. There are many patients in the ward and his latest include Colonel Norville Bliss who has dissociated from his past; Capt. Paul Winston who is nearly catatonic after spending 13 months hiding in a cellar behind enemy lines; and 20 year-old Cpl. Jim Tompkins who is severely traumatized after his aircraft was shot down. Others come and go, including Italian prisoners of war, but Newman and team all realize that their success means the men will return to their units.

Eileen is 22 and is smarting from her breakup with Russ. She comes to New York to visit her brother, Adam, who is an airline pilot. Eileen confides to her brother that she thinks she may be the only 22 year old virgin left in the world. Adam assures her that sex is not what all men look for and insists he hasn't slept around. Of course, Adam is lying and is in hot pursuit of a tryst with his occasional girlfriend Mona. However, Adam's date with Mona has a series of job related interruptions. Meanwhile, Eileen decides to see if she can have some fun for herself in New York, and seems to find the perfect candidate in Mike, a man she meets on the bus. But things get complicated when Russ pops in with a proposal and a mistaken assumption.

The Home-Made Car is a 1963 short film directed by James Hill about a young man who rebuilds a vintage car and finds love. Made in and around Farnborough, Hampshire, it became a cult success when regularly broadcast as a trade test colour transmission on the run up to the start of BBC2 colour transmissions. The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

The crooks in London know how it works. No one carries guns and no one resists the police. Then a new gang appears that go one better. They dress as police and steal from the crooks. This upset's the natural order of the police/criminal relationship and the police and the crooks join forces to catch the IPOs (Impersonating Police Officers), including an armoured car robbery in which the police must help the gangs to set a trap.

Maxwell Slaughter is a kind, heavyset guy who has reached the rank of master sergeant in the army. Admired by handsome young Sgt. Eustis Clay, Slaughter forms a close bond with his peer. Clay hopes to convince Slaughter to join him in a business venture outside of the service, but, in the meantime, he introduces the older officer to the beautiful young Bobby Jo Pepperdine, inadvertently creating trouble for both men.

Speedee Taxis is a great success, which means its workaholic owner Charlie starts neglecting Peggy, his wife. Suddenly a fleet of rival taxis appears from nowhere and start pinching all the fares. The rivals are Glamcabs, and they have a secret weapon. All their drivers are very attractive women! Who's behind Glamcabs? It's open warfare and only one fleet can survive!

Although he's only seven, Eddie's got it all figured out. He wants his father, a widower, to get remarried — to the girl next door. Unfortunately, she's not one of the women that his dad's been dating.

Henry J. Tyroone leaves Texas, where his oil wells are drying up, and arrives in New York with a lot of oil money to play with in the stock market. He meets stock analyst Molly Thatcher, who tries to ignore the lavish attention he spends on her but ...

A naive but caring prison chaplain, who happens to have the same last name as an upper class cleric, is by mistake appointed as vicar to a small and prosperous country town. His belief in charity and forgiveness sets him at odds with the conservative and narrow-minded locals, and he soon creates social ructions by appointing a black dustman as his churchwarden, taking in a gypsy family, and persuading the local landowner to provide free food for the church to distribute free to the people of the town. When the congregation leaders realise the mistake and call for the Church of England to remove him, this turns out to be a very, very difficult issue - until one clergyman realises that a British project to send a man into space is in need of an astronaut...

A singer goes to a small town for a performance before he is drafted.

A dramatized episode from Robert McCloskey's book "Homer Price." Shows Homer's resourcefulness in managing the dilemma created by a doughnut machine with a mind of its own.

A writer named Algernon (but called Harry by his friends) buys a picture of a boat on a lake, and his obsession with it renders normal life impossible.

Anthropology Professor Robert Orwell Sutwell and his secretary Marianne are studying the sex habits of teenagers. The surfing teens led by Frankie and Dee Dee don't have much sex but they sing, battle the motorcycle rats and mice led by Eric Von Zipper and dance to Dick Dale and the Del Tones.

A love-struck landlord tries to convince a pretty tanant to dump her fiancé and give him a chance.

A delightful short film shot in reverse in which the main protagonist enjoys a day on the town.

Mike works on a boat in Acapulco. When the bratty daughter of the boat owner gets him fired, Mike must find new work. Little boy Rauol helps him get a job as a lifeguard and singer at a local hotel. Clashes abound when Mike runs into the rival lifeguard, who is the champion diver of Mexico.

Sequel to The Mouse that Roared; The Tiny Country of Grand Fenwick has a hot water problem in the castle. To get the money necessary to put in a new set of plumbing, they request foreign aid from the U.S. for Space Research. The Russians then send aid as well to show that they too are for the internationalization of space. While the grand Duke is dreaming of hot baths, their one scientist is slapping together a rocket. The U.S. and Soviets get wind of the impending launch and try and beat them to the moon.

When a stranger enters a quiet, country town and is seduced by a sensuous married woman he unwittingly finds himself at the centre of a storm of sexual guilt and murder.

A down-and-out reporter and a fashion designer fall in love in Paris.

Beleaguered professor Ned Brainard has already run into a pile of misfortunes with his discovery of the super-elastic substance "Flubber." Now he hopes to have better luck with a gravity-busting derivative he's dubbed "Flubbergas." Ned's experiments, constantly hampered by government obstruction, earn the consternation of his wife, Betsy. But a game-winning modification to a football uniform may help Ned make the case for his fantastic new invention.

Two bear cubs, Tuffy and Tubby, are separated from their mother and spend an entire summer romping through Yellowstone National Park. In the meantime, the mother bear follows their trail as she searches for them.

A pair of Village beatniks goes up against a clan of moneyed squares vacationing on the Maine coast.

Mike and Danny fly a cropduster, but because of Danny's gambling debts, a local sheriff takes custody of it. Trying to earn money, they hitch-hike to the World's Fair in Seattle and, while Danny tries to earn money playing poker, Mike takes care of a small girl whose father has disappeared. Being a ladies' man, he also finds the time to court a young nurse.

Tenth entry in the Carry On series. Able seaman Poop-Decker signs up for adventure on the high seas with the wicked Captain Fearless. Those swabbing the decks include Juliet Mills, Charles Hawtrey and Donald Houston. The film was originally to be titled Up the Armada, but the British Board of Film Censors objected to such a rude title.

The "Ladies Who Do" are office cleaners. One of them discovers some hot stock tips and they make a fortune. They then make good use of it to save their old neighbourhoods from the wicked developer.

Marvin the Martian is monitoring through his telescope a rocket launch on Earth. The rocket heads straight for him and lands on Mars. The only occupant is Bugs Bunny, lured into Cape Canaveral by a carrot and sent to Mars as an expendable "astro-rabbit". Bugs is to claim Mars in the name of the Earth, but Marvin won't allow an Earth creature to contaminate his atmosphere. He trains a time-projector gun on Bugs and reverts the bunny to a Neanderthal Rabbit, who crushes Marvin with one hand.

Parker Ballantine is a New York theater critic and his wife writes a play that may or may not be very good. Now Parker must either get out of reviewing the play or cause the breakup of his marriage.

When Frank Michaelson, well-respected president of the board of education, is falsely accused of horseplay, he blames his 19-year-old daughter, who has grown into a desirable young woman.

An American car salesman in London becomes mixed up in a series of fatal occurrences at a secluded mansion.