8mm Forum: Charly

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Posted by Melvin England (Member # 5270) on August 13, 2018, 12:28 PM:

Charly (Cliff Robertson) is a mentally challenged adult who is given a task to complete by his psychiatrist teacher (Claire Bloom). The challenge is this... on a piece of paper there is a puzzle in the form of a maze. The idea is to work out how to get from the entrance to the food using a pencil to mark the route. A mouse, Algernon,is placed in a labyrinth next to Charly, which is the same as the puzzle in front of him. The challenge is to see if he can beat the mouse to reach the food first.

Charly fails.

He is then told that the mouse was "special" in that it had had a special operation to make it intelligent, and would Charly like the same operation? Yes he would.
Afterwards, the same maze/mouse challenge is repeated but to Charly's dismay, he still fails. Later, when all is quiet, he challenges the mouse a second time.... and succeeds.The operation worked! To celebrate, he runs and shouts for joy right across to the teacher's house to tell her the news.

In later scenes,the now non-challenged Charly turns up at the teacher's house with a present for her and tells her that he loves her. Eventually she accepts the shift in their relationship.

Charly is a guest of honour at a doctor's seminar, but things don't go as they had planned. During his speech, Charly produces a dead Algernon mouse from his pocket and asks "Why didn't you tell me the operation wasn't permanent?"

What follows, is the slow disintegration of Charly's false intelligence via both hallucinations in his flat, and the breaking up of his newly found relationship. The final shot shows Charly back to his challenged self, enjoying a see-saw ride in the park with other children.

The film is a 400' colour sound film from Ken Films. My copy was very warm but the colours were still there. The sound was also fine.

A bit of an unusual item that does not seem to surface very often which is worth seeing as,without ever seeing the full feature,it appears to tell a complete story. A nice edit.

Posted by Osi Osgood (Member # 424) on August 16, 2018, 11:21 AM:

I once had the 5X400ft version of this from ABC films, the same folks who did the 400ft version as well), and this worked real well as a 5X400ft digest. The color on my print was just slightly off but passable. How has you're print held up?

by the way, a truly moving film. Cliff Robertson, essentially, had to play two different roles in the same character, and that is quite difficult.

I really liked the ending, it seems to make out that, yes, Charly has lost his "intellect", but being that he probalby has lost the memories that came with it, he is back to his challenged but blissful self.

Thanks for the review!

Posted by Brian Fretwell (Member # 4302) on August 16, 2018, 01:45 PM:

I have never seen the film, but did go to see the stage show "Flowers for Algernon" based on it (or maybe an orginal book) staring Michael Crawford in the early 1980's.

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