BONUS BLOG -- 1968: CHARLY

What’s it about?

Cliff Robertson plays Charly, a mentally challenged adult who spends his days sweeping up at a Boston bakery and his evenings fruitlessly trying to improve his reading and writing at night school. His teacher (played by Claire Bloom) suggests him as a candidate for an experimental surgery that has a chance of improving his intelligence.

Following the surgery, Charly at first doesn’t seems no different. But gradually his personality begins to change, and soon he’s performing better on aptitude tests as well. In only a few weeks, Charly outstrips his teacher and reaches genius levels of intelligence. But just as he seems to be adapting emotionally to his new condition, evidence suggests that the changes are only temporary.




Is it any good?

I thought I’d finished with 1968 a couple weeks ago, but then I went and watched CHARLY. I’d seen it before -- or at least most of it -- ages ago, and I’ve read FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (the Daniel Keyes novel it’s based on) at least twice. So I didn’t expect there to be many surprises, and for the first half of the movie there weren’t any.

I’ve always thought that the idea behind FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON is better than the book itself. For one thing, the story is pretty predictable once the trajectory is established. For another, it’s written as a first-person diary kept by Charly Gordon and the intentional misspellings and mistakes in the “dumb” chapters are pretty distracting to me. On the other hand, it’s a very memorable story and it raises a lot of interesting questions.




The first half of the movie is about what I expected (and faintly remembered). Charly goes about his daily life working at the bakery, going to night school, and riding on tour buses on his day off. He clearly misses a lot of what’s going on around him, and the guys at the bakery especially play some mean tricks on him. But he’s also functional enough to hold down a menial job and live in his own tiny apartment. The transition from dumb Charly to smart Charly happens pretty swiftly once it gets going -- there aren’t many intermediate stages between “mentally challenged” and “genius”. But there is one pretty great scene where the doctors are testing Charly after the procedure and there’s no noticeable improvement in his aptitude. But as Charly reacts in frustration to his failures, it’s suddenly clear that he’s already a different person with a different level of self-awareness. It’s a pretty subtle point that plays out in a neat way -- and shortly after that, Charly is confidently solving problems that would stump the average adult.

So far, so good. But about halfway through the movie, the story jumps violently off the tracks and never gets entirely back on again. It’s no surprise that as Charly grows more self-aware, he starts to notice that his night teacher is a very pretty lady. Soon, he’s head over heels in love with her, and shows up late one night at her apartment. There’s a very uncomfortable scene where he tries to kiss her, and she reacts very badly -- pushing him away and literally screaming that nobody would ever want him. Charly storms off into a psychedelic split-screen montage in which he apparently grows a beard, becomes a biker, and lives a wild rock ‘n’ life for a couple of weeks.

Here’s the montage:



Seeing it out of context, it’s hard to explain just how jarring and inexplicable it is. This is the first of a long series of what I believe are technically termed “weirdo expressionistic freak outs” in the second half of the movie. This particular one is a complete departure from everything -- we have never seen those bikers or dancers before and we never see them again. And except for this single minute and a half sequence, there is practically no reference ever made to Charly’s rumschpringa again. When he comes back, he’s cleanshaven, sober, serious-minded, and doesn’t seem inclined to talk about his experience at all. (When the teacher asks him what he learned, he says simply, “I’m back.”)

I should mention that this montage is neither the first nor last time that split screens are used in the movie, but it’s certainly the most dramatic. Up until this point, they are used mostly to show the faces of two different characters who are talking to one another at the same time. So in the earlier instances the split-screen feels almost anthropological -- like a scientific observation of human interaction. But this montage is clearly supposed to be some kind of psychotic, emotionally fractured breakdown.

Directly following this sequence, Charly and the teacher do end up romantically involved. Though this interlude isn’t what I would ordinarily call a “freak out”, it is certainly expressionistic. It’s all sun-dappled forests and glittering golden ponds, sensuous stretching and sweet murmured nothings. This is followed by a sequence where Charly is presented at a scientific conference. The psychologists and doctors begin to question him, and he has a kind of civilized freak out where he starts spouting cynical philosophical pronouncements.

Here’s the question segment (sorry for the aspect ratio):



The moment in that conference where Charly confronts the scientists with the knowledge that he will soon start losing his intelligence is the first time that this possibility is mentioned in the movie. Up until that point, it’s always been assumed that the intelligence boost is permanent. So immediately following this, there is the final expressionistic freak out, in which Charly is literally haunted by the specter of his former self. This is probably my least favorite part of the movie, since the “dumb” Charly looks so sinister and threatening. Of course, that makes sense -- Charly is afraid of losing his intelligence, so naturally he’ll imagine his old self as something to be feared. But it also turns the old “dumb” Charly (who was a very likeable character at the start of the movie) into a sneaking caricature. And since we don’t really get to spend any time with Charly after his intelligence is all gone again, these are practically the last images we see of what he will become. And it’s a much more depressing and frightening picture than what is shown at the beginning of the movie.

Anyway, here’s the final sequence:



Now, if you’re like me, then you couldn’t stop yourself from laughing by the very end of that clip. (Actually, if you’re like me, you were laughing back in the first montage sequence.) A lot of the last half of the movie dances right on the line between “earnestly artistic” and “unintentionally hilarious”. Times may have been different back in 1968, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that people were so different forty years ago that nobody thought of laughing during these scenes. A lot of humor comes from the unexpected -- and each of these freak outs is certainly unexpected -- and it would take a person of amazing skill to keep the sequences unpredictable but keep them from being funny. In any event, they definitely make for a unique ending to the movie. As I said, I’ve often thought the book is too predictable towards the end, and at least CHARLY does not make those same mistakes. I don’t think it accomplishes 100% of what it sets out to do, but when you start trying weirdo tactics you aren’t necessarily going to get predictable results.