Charly (1968)

Based on "The 2 Worlds of Charlie Gordon," this 1968 heartbreaking film was excellent. Cliff Robertson, as Charly, gave a rousing performance and in an upset to rival 1947 when Loretta Young ("The Farmer's Daughter") beat out Rosalind Russell for "Mourning Becomes Electra, Cliff Robertson won the best actor award despite the fact that Peter O'Toole was heavily favored to win for "The Lion in Winter."Robertson gave everything in his award winning performance. As a retarded individual, he takes an experimental drug and reaches genius capacity with it. What he is not told is that he will eventually revert back to his retardation. How he reverts back was memorably shown.

At the risk of revealing my approximate age, I will tell you that forty years ago I considered this movie to be excellent and was greatly impressed with the performances of Cliff Robertson and the beautiful Claire Bloom. Alas, time has gone by and after watching this movie again my opinion has changed. What I once considered to be a sensitive dramatization of the plight of the mentally challenged is today little more than typical simplistic Hollywood hokum. For this movie to be truly effective it has to has some connection to reality, and here the movie fails. This movie asks the audience to believe that a man, who according to the movie is a moron, is transformed into an idiot savant bordering on genius and then mysteriously regresses but while in the genius phase has a relationship with his psychologist who disregards every ethical and legal standard of her profession to act out her counter-transference fantasies. The question here is: who is more maladjusted? The hapless patient who is a victim of a weird experimental procedure, something that a Nazi scientist would have concocted and then goes awry, an experiment conducted apparently without the patient's informed consent, or his pathetic out-of-control psychologist who takes advantage of her patient for her own personal gratification? Also the performances themselves are unconvincing. Even in the "moron" phase Cliff Robertson does not seem mentally slow enough or disabled enough to warrant undergoing a radical experimental procedure and Claire Bloom's performance as the psychologist borders on the laughable. Her behavior is so erratic and irresponsible that I was waiting for the scene where someone calls the state licensing board to demand the revocation of her license. One of the lowest points of the movie is when Ms. Bloom's character asks, no begs, Charly to marry her after they find out that the operation has failed. It would have been better if Charly had said yes so that in the next scene the psychologist could be shown acting out her maternal fantasies with the now post-genius "moronic" Charly who is again babbling like a child but at least now has a surrogate mother to take care of him while they sleep in the same bed as husband and wife. Ugh!The purpose of a therapeutic relationship is to help the patient improve their functioning in society. The clinician is supposed to closely monitor the patient's progress toward achieving certain goals, utilizing the most effective and appropriate therapeutic techniques to achieve these goals - all for the benefit of the patient, not the therapist. However, in this movie the therapist's only goal is to have sex with the patient who has undergone a remarkable intellectual transformation but is still a patient. Ultimately the therapist's self-serving acting out hurts the confused and bewildered patient who is permitted, indeed encouraged to act out his sexual fantasies with his therapist. The movie provides a sensationalistic and completely unfair portrayal of mental health services.

The director, Ralph Nelson, used to be the property master on the Twilight Zone, if I remember correctly, and to be honest he doesn't bring much to the party here. Split screens -- ugh.But this is more than made up for by almost everything else about the film -- the location shooting, the photography, the score, and the performances.People have won Oscars for playing mutes, ADDs, and height-challenged people, as a kind of sign, I suppose, that the voters are on the side of the angels. Cliff Robertson deserved his Oscar, though. He's entirely good in the role. His full-scale IQ is supposed to be around 70 but he brings to his performance the expressions and body language of someone who is profoundly retarded, if the residents of Mussbrugger Hall at the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute are any example. He overacts, that is to say. But it fits the role perfectly.I'll give just one example. Early in the movie, just after the opening, he wanders around a college campus, uncomprehending, as he watches and listens to the students discuss Jung. One of the students flings a jacket over a shoulder. Robertson, in imitation, takes off his own unfashionable leather jacket and flings it over his own shoulder. Not once, but twice -- the first time evidently not having satisfied him. What a neat touch. And it belongs to Robertson.The score is by Pandit Ravi Shankar, of whom we hear little today. But Ravi Shankar belongs up there in the ranks of instrumental virtuosos with Heifitz and Rubenstein. "Sitar" is an from an old Indo-European word, which has also given us "guitar" and "zither".The movie has a tolerant attitude towards such things as smoking pot. "Danger: Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health." We've come a long way towards self righteousness since then. Now you can't make a joke out of it, let alone actually DO it. This is a complicated subject that I will restrain myself from going on about. My position, in French, could be rendered as "A chaque a son gout." In the end, Charlie loses his boosted IQ and returns to his previous state. I am happy for him that he managed to smoke some dope and get laid in the brief interval of his lucidity.

This is the wost movie I have ever seen. This Movie is based on the book "Flowers for Algernon", but is missing almost everything that made the book good. In the movie there were no flashbacks, he never caught Gimpy stealing from Mr. Donner, he did not get his job back at the bakery at the end of the movie like he did in the book, no progress reports were written, his parents and sister were not even mentioned, Fay was not in the movie, the title of the movie has no meaning because he did not put Flowers on Algernon's grave, Charly and Alice moved to far to fast with there relationship when in the story Charly kept getting sick when he and Alice were getting intimate, and in the movie Charly seemed to get smart too fast which took away from the suspense of the movie. I was much happier with the book, the movie has too many holes in the story.