Charly
Directed by Ralph Nelson
Written by Stirling Silliphant from a novel by Daniel Keyes
1968?US
IMDb link
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Charly Gordon: What’s enough love?

Alice Kinnian: Always a little more than anyone ever gets.[/box]

Despite my many quibbles, this futuristic love story kept my interest throughout.

It is sometime in the very near future.  Charly Gordon (Cliff Robertson) is a sweet-tempered developmentally disabled man who tries to better himself by attending a night school class taught by beautiful researcher/teacher Alice (Claire Bloom) and working as a janitor in a bakery.  Alice is also working with scientists who have successfully created genius mice.

One of the subjects, Algernon, beats Charly consistently at mazes.  The scientists are ready to start human experimentation and Alice encourages them to pick Charly as the test subject.

As the surgical changes take effect, things don’t work out great at first for Charly.  His frustration leads to him becoming a very angry individual.  Then his new-found maturity leads him to fall in love with Alice, who is engaged.  Things gradually get better until they don’t.

I have a number of niggles with this movie starting with Robertson’s Oscar-winning, Oscar-bait performance.  He’s great when he gets smarter but overdoes it by a long shot at the beginning of the film.  I have never seen a developmentally-disabled person behave this way.   Second, the film is filled with “artistic” editing and split-screen work that doesn’t really work.  Other than that it’s an enjoyably well-made movie with a nice score by Ravi Shankar.  The print available on YouTube is not the greatest.

Interesting how the word “retardate” was bandied about in 1968.

Cliff Robertson won the Academy Award for Best Actor.  Peter O’Toole was again robbed, IMO, for his outstanding work in The Lion in Winter (1968).

Clip (spoiler)