I.Q. (1994) on Netflix
Auto mechanic Ed Walters falls for Catherine Boyd, a doctoral candidate at Princeton. She is engaged to James Moreland, so her uncle Albert Einstein and his scientist friends scheme to help Ed.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.2/1027,955 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes45%
Trailer
Plot summary
At Princeton in the 1950s, Catherine Boyd is a doctoral candidate in mathematics, engaged to James Moreland, a professor who studies experimental psychology. Their car breaks down at a garage where Ed Walters works as a mechanic, and he falls for Catherine the moment he sees her. Ed brings back the watch she left behind and meets her uncle, Albert Einstein, and his fellow scientists Nathan Liebknecht, Kurt Gödel and Boris Podolsky. Ed admits how he feels about Catherine, and the four men bring Albert's car to the garage for a convertible rebuild while they work out how to interest her. When Ed jokes that he would like to borrow their brains, they decide to pass him off as a secret genius, taking his supposed idea for a cold fusion powered spacecraft from an unpublished paper of Albert's.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about I.Q. (1994)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Albert Einstein did not have a niece by the name of Catherine Boyd, and Kurt Gödel was famously shy and reclusive, unlike his fictional counterpart in this film.
- The characters in the film listen to Little Richard's “Tutti-Frutti”, a record that was released in November 1955, although Albert Einstein died the previous April.
- 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.
- Director Fred Schepisi said the film was not what it could have been: two other producers, the studio and Tim Robbins were all contributing, and Robbins was being difficult because he said that in the '90s nobody would like a character who has a woman fall in love with him because of a lie, the film's whole premise.
- Apart from Walter Matthau, the film's other three scientists were originally going to be played by Peter Ustinov, Barry Humphries and John Cleese. That line-up was wanted all the way through, but nobody understood how strong they would be.
