General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Charly

Charly is a 1968 American drama film directed by Ralph Nelson, written by Stirling Silliphant, and starring Cliff Robertson as Charly Gordon, a cognitively impaired bakery worker who undergoes experimental neurosurgery that briefly raises him from subnormal intelligence to genius, before the effect reverses. It is based on Daniel Keyes's story Flowers for Algernon, first published as a short story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1959 and expanded into a novel in 1966.¹^•² Robertson won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the title role.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	World premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, 28 June 1968; New York opening 23 September 1968⁴
Source	Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (short story, April 1959; novel, 1966)²
Running time / format	106 minutes, Technicolor, 35 mm Techniscope⁴
Principal cast	Cliff Robertson (Charly Gordon), Claire Bloom (Alice Kinian), Lilia Skala (Dr. Anna Straus), Leon Janney (Dr. Richard Nemur)¹
Music	Ravi Shankar, his first American feature film score⁵
Major award	Academy Award for Best Actor, Cliff Robertson, 1969³
Later adaptation	Remade for television as Flowers for Algernon (2000), starring Matthew Modine⁶

Spoilers

Story

Charly Gordon is a gentle thirty-year-old man with an intellectual disability who works as a sweeper in a Boston bakery, where co-workers he considers his friends make him the butt of cruel jokes. He attends night classes taught by Alice Kinian, who is touched by his persistence and arranges for him to be examined by Dr. Richard Nemur, a neurosurgeon, and Dr. Anna Straus, a psychiatrist. Having already restored the intelligence of impaired mice through surgery, the pair of physicians now seeks a human participant, and Charly, tested for the first time, performs worse than a lab mouse named Algernon. After experimental surgery his intelligence improves rapidly, and he passes into the genius category, but his emotional development does not keep pace. He falls in love with Alice, and he and his doctors discover that the effect of the operation will not be permanent: he will slip back to subnormal intelligence.⁴^•⁷

The film begins and ends with Charly playing on a swing set among children; the closing scene reveals the opening as a prolepsis of his decline.⁸

From television play to feature film

Robertson's long attachment. Cliff Robertson originated the role of Charlie Gordon in the made-for-television production The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, broadcast on 22 February 1961 as part of the anthology series The U.S. Steel Hour; the performance brought him a nomination for an Emmy for Outstanding Single Lead Actor Performance. In April 1961 he acquired the film rights, motivated in part by having seen roles he originated on television or stage go to other actors in the film versions.¹ He spent $50,000 of his own money on development.¹

The screenplay. Robertson enlisted William Goldman to adapt the script. When Robertson showed Daniel Keyes a draft with the cover page removed, Keyes rejected it, objecting to an implausibly upbeat Hollywood ending; only years later, reading Goldman's book Adventures in the Screen Trade, did Keyes learn whose draft he had turned down. Goldman was replaced by Stirling Silliphant, whose credits included In the Heat of the Night (1967).⁵

Financing and casting. Funding was difficult because of the film's theme of mental disability; Ralph Nelson said Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been briefly interested and that United Artists rejected the picture after the failure of its 1963 film about mentally disabled children, A Child Is Waiting. Anne Heywood was originally cast as Alice Kinian but dropped out around the start of principal photography on 25 September 1967 in Boston, and Claire Bloom was hired in her place.⁹ Shooting moved to Los Angeles in December 1967, with final scenes at MGM studios in Culver City.⁹

Visual style. Wanting a modern look, Robertson sent Nelson to Expo 67, the 1967 World's Fair in Canada, to learn about new filmmaking technology. The film uses multiple-image montages and split-screen techniques in place of cross-cutting in some dialogue scenes; Silliphant noted that foreign filmmakers such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had used these tools but Hollywood had not embraced them.⁵^•⁹

Reception and box office

Critical reception was mixed. Reviews in Variety, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times in 1968 were largely negative, but a slow release plan devised by Cinerama let the film build through word of mouth and Robertson's months of personal promotion; a 1969 Los Angeles Times article projected that the film, which cost an estimated $1.3 to 1.5 million, would gross between $9 and $10 million.⁹

Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013, gave the film a positive review in December 1968, rating it two and a half stars. He argued that the film succeeds as the story of a personality in crisis but that the scientific premise is weak and distracts from the human story, and he praised Robertson's portrait of Charly as sensitive and believable.⁷ Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "science-fiction without gadgets, a horror film without thrills" and judged it inferior to the novel.¹⁰ Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, called it "a slovenly piece of moviemaking".¹⁰ On Metacritic the film holds a metascore of 50, based on six critic reviews; on Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 55% Tomatometer from 20 reviews and a 62% audience score.¹⁰^•¹¹

Awards

Robertson won the 1969 Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role; he was not present at the ceremony, and Frank Sinatra accepted the award on his behalf. He was also named Best Actor by the National Board of Review, which placed the film on its Top Ten list. Stirling Silliphant won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, and the film was nominated for Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture, Drama and Best Actor, Drama. At the Berlin festival it was nominated for the Golden Berlin Bear, and it received a Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation.³^•⁹

Assessment and legacy

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia credits the film with seriously addressing ideas about intelligence and feeling and the ethics of scientific research, calling it more ambitious than most science fiction films of its time, while noting that Nelson milks the sentimental story and that Charly's genius phase is marred by platitudes in Silliphant's script.² A 2022 academic reassessment by Glyn Miller, published in Science Fiction Film and Television, argues that the film is a landmark in science fiction cinema's representation of persons with disabilities: although it appears to endorse the trope of technoscientific cure, it engages equivocally with the 1960s American "normalization" agenda, which sought to move cognitively impaired people out of institutions into normative community roles, and it questions the normative valorization of intelligence in modern society.⁸

The film's success also helped sales of Keyes's novel, which Bantam Books used in a joint project sponsoring screenings for educators in major cities, at which Robertson often appeared.⁵ The story was adapted again for television as Flowers for Algernon (2000), starring Matthew Modine; the Deseret News judged the remake more faithful to Keyes's novel than Charly had been, while Common Sense Media called the 2000 film a forgettable B-film compared with the 1968 adaptation.⁶^•¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films before 1970

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?