Charly

Charly Gordon is thirty and intellectually disabled; he works in a bakery and goes to a reading class in the evenings. Doctors perform on him an operation first tried on a mouse and his intelligence rises fast, soon passing that of the scientists who operated. Then the mouse begins to decline. Ralph Nelson adapted Daniel Keyes's story Flowers for Algernon. The real subject is not intelligence but how people treat Charly according to it: his workmates liked him before and are frightened of him now. Cliff Robertson chased the part for years and won an Oscar with it. Some of the film's mid-sixties formal experiments look dated now. Who it is for: viewers who like science fiction crossed with drama and classic adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by the period's representation of disability.