Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Absolutely the worst movie.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I did not like this movie at all. The only good part in this movie for me was Cliff Robertson, he did a really good job with his mannerisms. He really did seem like a different person before and after the operation.I watched the movie because of Flowers for Algernon but it only shares names and the basic premise with the book. The movie doesn't really show any understanding of the book. The movie is almost 2 hours long, and yet everything seems so rushed. Ideas are thrown at you but we don't really experience them. In the book changes are gradual at first and the process speeds up. In the movie everything just happens, he gets an operation and becomes a genius. Then just as quickly he loses it, like literally in the middle of a sentence. The movie also really missed out on showing the intellectual and emotional implications shown in the novel. In the novel Charly has an intellectual awakening. He becomes so smart that he passes everyone up. This leads him to see that people all have a limit to what they know. Because of this he feels people are like frauds, pretending to be something they are not. It angers him scientists only know about certain things. On the emotional side his intelligence quickly and vastly surpasses his emotional understanding. He can not relate to people or understand them. As he becomes a genius, he is not even at the level of an adolescent, emotionally speaking. The idea of love is not one that he can truly understand until almost the very end. In the movie, ugh they just throw a love story at us without reason. I mean what in the movie can explain why his teacher would fall in love with him. She just does. It shows Charly become sexually awakened, then he is forceful on her, leaves and seems to develop relationships with many women, and comes back and they are in love. It really makes no sense, even ignoring the novel.

I saw this movie at the drive-in when I was 12. I recall finding it to be a touching tragedy. I used to volunteer with "the special ed class", and found the students there to be gentle and grateful and affectionate, and could never understand how the other kids could make fun of them the way they did. But that only explains how and why this touched me personally, even at the age of 12.Reviews some 30 years after this film was made are very critical, calling it 'schlock', and criticizing the simplification of a complex issue. However, over the last 30-40 years, society has become more enlightened about both mental retardation, but also about what science can and cannot do. It was easier to suspend belief and go with the concept.At the time, this movie conveyed something new about how a mentally retarded person might view their situation....that alone made this film unique; lots of people never even considered the feelings of the mentally retarded, so this film surely opened some eyes.And way ahead of it's time (I'm sure this was never considered in making the film), because it conveys the feelings and reactions of someone who is losing their intellectual capacity....such as those suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's. At that time, little thought was given by the average person about the feelings of either the mentally retarded, or people with Alzheimer's or dementia.I'm sure the book was better than the movie; that almost always goes without saying. However, movies reach audiences that books sometimes don't, and this movie reached a new audience.I'm afraid too many reviewers are unable to see an older movie and not hold it to the same standards, socially, scientifically and a cinematography standpoint. Cinema has evolved, as has society and science, and it's quite interesting to watch "Charly" with that in mind.

Based on "The 2 Worlds of Charlie Gordon," this 1968 heartbreaking film was excellent. Cliff Robertson, as Charly, gave a rousing performance and in an upset to rival 1947 when Loretta Young ("The Farmer's Daughter") beat out Rosalind Russell for "Mourning Becomes Electra, Cliff Robertson won the best actor award despite the fact that Peter O'Toole was heavily favored to win for "The Lion in Winter."Robertson gave everything in his award winning performance. As a retarded individual, he takes an experimental drug and reaches genius capacity with it. What he is not told is that he will eventually revert back to his retardation. How he reverts back was memorably shown.

Let me just start off by saying that I absolutely loved the book "Flowers for Algernon", which we read in my lit class at school. It was probably the best book I've ever been forced to read. Also at our school, they made us watch this movie after finishing it. I found this film at best a poor adaption of a great novel and at worst, a disastrous attempt at surrealist film-making.First, the positives: The actors, especially male and female leads are excellent and have a definite chemistry together on screen, however they seem a bit confined by the material they are given to perform.Now, the far more lengthly section of my review: the negatives. 1. Cinematography. The whole movie seems to have been shot in a style to suggest being on a bad acid-trip (not that I would know the feeling.). Many scenes are an endless, ridiculously over metaphorical montage where it would have been much simpler and more effective to use a more straight forward approach. For some odd reason, the director also decided to use a split screen effect at certain arbitrary points in the film for no apparent reason other than possibly the notion that it looked cool.2. Writing. This is probably my biggest problem with the film. The writing in the movie is simply incredulous, seeing as it not only departs from the book in unnecessary ways, which I will detail later, but it also changes the plot in ways that make no logical sense, such as changing it so that the doctors don't tell Charlie that the effects of the operation may not be permanent, not something a 20th century medical professional is likely to do given that a patient must give informed consent before undergoing an operation. The beginning portion drags on, filled with scenes of Charlie doing childish activities such as playing on a slide or driving bumper cars to the point where one feels like jumping up on one's chair and screaming "We get it! He's retarded!". The most nonsensical plot twist is the series of scenes in which Charlie, not being emotionally developed, tries to force himself on Ms. Kinnian and is, as a result, slapped and called "A stupid moron", then departs on a motorcycle trip for no readily apparent reason and comes back and is suddenly sleeping with Ms. Kinnian, whose fiancée just magically disappears, which leaves the audience scratching its head and saying "Didn't she just slap and insult him two scenes ago? I wish my life worked like that."3. The Ending. I have given this it's own section because I feel it deserves special attention. At the end of the novel, the reader basically has two ways of interpreting it: Relocation or Suicide (the latter being my preferred interpretation). However, this version removes all of the guesswork by simply giving you no clues as to what happens after he regresses back to his former state. Instead, you get a long, stretched out scene in which he is chased by his former self through long, white hallways for about five minutes, and one is left with a similar reaction I mentioned having during the beginning portion. This is one of the few movies in which I have been shocked to see the end credits, as it just ends with a freeze-frame of Charlie on the teeter-totter and leaves the story completely unresolved.I'm sorry if the above review seems a bit rantish, however these are simply my criticisms of the film. If you enjoyed it, then that's all well and good. To each his own.