Hollywood has a long list of sci-fi movies featuring some lab experiment gone wrong and bringing disaster to the characters as well as posing a possible threat to humanity. But with Charly (1968), Director Ralph Nelson brought a different kind of sci-fi story to life on the screen, one that doesn’t attempt to terrify people, but enlighten them.

An adaptation of Daniel Keyes’ 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon, Charly features the transformative journey of its eponymous character (played by Cliff Robertson), a janitor in Boston who lives with the unfortunate reality of intellectual disability (the movie refers to it as “retardation,” a term that has since fallen out of acceptable usage for being derogatory). Charly’s teacher Alice (Claire Bloom) takes him to behavioral science re...

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