After having done The Days Of Wine And Roses On the small screen and seeing Jack Lemmon get the part for the big screen, Cliff Robertson pulled a Katharine Hepburn. Like Kate the great who bought the screen rights to The Philadelphia Story and dictated the making of it to MGM, Robertson did the same for Charly which he had done on the US Steel Hour almost a decade earlier on television. He did better than Lemmon who only was nominated for Best Actor for Days Of Wine And Roses.

Charly is the story of an amiable mildly retarded man who works and supports himself in a job at a bakery, but also has agreed to become an experimental subject to scientists, Claire Bloom, Leon Janney, and Lilia Skala. Janney has a theory in which he feels that the proper enzyme given and an operation and Robertson could start to function like a normal person.

The operation has some foreseen and unforeseen consequences. One of them is that Robertson is one fully functioning male, but still lacks a whole lot of social skills. He forms an attachment to Bloom which is something she saw coming, but not necessarily her.

More important he becomes far more aware of the world around him and how badly treated he was by a lot of people. One role I very much liked was that of his landlady Ruth White who was a woman with a big heart who does value Robertson as a person and gives him the respect any of us is due.

Still the film belongs to Cliff Robertson who won an Oscar for Best Actor in 1968. Robertson had some stiff competition that year, but probably was helped by the fact that three of his competitors were British, Alan Bates for The Fixer, Ron Moody for Oliver, and Peter O'Toole for The Lion In Winter who if memory serves was the betting favorite. The other nominee was Alan Arkin for The Heart Is The Lonely Hunter. How he manages to go from a mildly retarded man to a person of no mean erudition is a wonderful process unfolding on the screen. Personally I think it ought to be required viewing in every acting class on the globe, the subtleties are something to behold.

I don't claim to be any kind of scientific expert on this or any other scientific matter, but I would love to hear from those who know more as to whether the whole theory is feasible or not. In any event though Charly is a fine picture with both a message and a heart.

Charly Gordon (Cliff Robertson) is a mentally handicapped adult. At work, he is the butt of joke. They all laugh at him but he doesn't understand and his happy personality never allows him to be bitter. He attends ESL night school with teacher Alice Kinnian (Claire Bloom). She recruits him for a school lab experiment. They have performed surgery on a mice named Algernon to increase its intelligence. Charly finds himself losing to Algernon in maze runs.

Everybody read the novel "Flowers for Algernon" for their high school English class. There are a few other adaptations over the years. There are also movies like I am Sam where the lead plays mentally handicapped. For that, Sean Penn was nominated for an Oscar playing a mentally handicapped character. In this one, Cliff Robertson actually won. Nowadays, there is a sense of faking in playing handicap although this character has to go through a range of abilities. The performance is fine but I don't think it would win in today's world. The compelling scenes are probably Charly being bullied by his co-workers. Those are brutal. The drama isn't much. The movie could have put the audience more into Charly's shoes. This is pretty good.

Cheryl Gordon is a mentally handicapped man, played wonderfully by Cliff Robertson, who is tormented by society. The novella it is based on is a study in how the brain begins to change and his acuity with it. The language changes from stilted phrases to long, complex sentences. Here, things happens fast. Charly has brain surgery and begins to grow in intellect. It is a quantum leap in that he rises to high levels overnight. This is OK because we accept it in the movie, but his lack of experiences aren't really dealt with. Imagine a man not even knowing what the stock market is and then investing in it. He would still have to have the experience of some economic knowledge development. This is a story of great tragedy because the experiences of love and longing stay but he is left to his own designs.