The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
(2011)
The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby Blu-ray delivers great video and solid audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
A personal exploration into the life of the United States of America's controversial former CIA Director, CIA Spymaster William Colby, told through the eyes of his wife and filmmaker son, Carl. Through extraordinary events in twentieth century history, this consummate soldier/spy stood at the center of the Agency's most clandestine activities and operations. The film reveals the 'cover life' of this CIA operative, who followed orders and took on the dirtiest assignments until the Nixon Administration ordered him to 'stonewall' Congress about the CIA's past abuses, but he refused. This film reveals why, for the first time, he could not obey.
Most of us think we know our parents pretty well. After all, many of us spent our first eighteen or so years with
at least one of our parents (what with the increasing number of divorce), and at least a few grew up with original
"parental units" still married and intact. But of course a child's perception of his (or her) adult parents is obviously
skewed, and often unrealistic. There are usually at least some aspects of a parent's life that are under normal
circumstances never part of the terrain for a typical child's point of view. Sometimes, though, there can be major
surprises as a child grows up and learns more about a parent's past. I personally felt a special sort of kinship with Carl
Colby, whose riveting documentary The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William
Colby attempts to shed some light on a notoriously circumspect figure. Like Carl, my father was also a much
decorated World War II veteran who had risen through the ranks of a post-World War II universe to achieve significant
success and, as a U.S. Army Major General, Top Secret clearance status. And like the elder Colby, my father was
unusually reticent about his military life, more often than not refusing to discuss events either in the past or the
present. There were a couple of other intersections of relationships, as my father had close personal and professional
ties with two men who would come into contact with William Colby, both for the positive and the negative, Gen. William
Westmoreland and Senator Frank Church. But of course William Colby's story is highly unique and literally incomparable
to virtually anyone else's in the twentieth century, and that also makes his son's reminiscence of his father similarly one
of a kind. What becomes increasingly evident throughout The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA
Spymaster William Colby is that Colby himself didn't want anyone to know him—not his coworkers, not his
wife, and seemingly least of all his children. This is a story of dissociation rather than traditional dysfunction. As Carl
Colby recounts his father's life, he makes no bones about the fact that his father was an isolationist in a very personal
sense. No one ever got very close to William Colby.
When William Colby's empty canoe washed up on the shore near his home in Rock Point, Maryland in 1997, it seemed
like
something out of the sort of spy novel that Colby's career seemed to be in direct contradiction to. Colby was not a
James
Bond or even a George Smiley (though he was much closer to Smiley than to Bond). Colby was a kind of technocrat,
one
who had carved out his niche in the intelligence community starting in World War II and the OSS and then matriculating
into what was then the "new, improved" Central Intelligence Agency. With his natty suits and conservative glasses,
Colby
was the very model of a businessman, not necessarily the architect for some of the biggest covert actions of the
mid-twentieth century. And so when his canoe returned empty, and Colby's body was nowhere to be found, it
immediately made headlines in a way that Colby had tried to avoid (often without success, especially in the 1970s)
throughout his career.
Carl Colby starts with that mysterious death (his father's body did wash up on shore a little over a week later,
but that only intensified the mystery of what had happened), and then works backward, defining his father's daredevil
World War II exploits as a training ground of sorts for what would become a life and career in the spy trade. Colby is
aided by a huge variety of noted commentators, people like Donald Rumsfield, Bob Woodward and a number of Colby's
cohorts at the
CIA, but it's Carl's mother, William's first wife Barbara, who provides the most telling anecdotes. A graceful, perfectly
coiffed elderly woman, Barbara is obviously proud of her former husband (despite the fact that he unceremoniously
dumped her rather late in both of their lives), while at the same time expressing repeated perplexity at what really
made William tick. Both Barbara and William were devout Catholics, and a strong moral code is obviously part and
parcel of Barbara's makeup, one she attempts to reconcile with some of William's more notorious projects, like
Operation Phoenix which allegedly targeted foreign leaders for assassination.
With such a central figure in such epochal times, there's bound to be a Reader's Digest feeling to some of
The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby, but the documentary actually
does a really fine job hitting several of the high points of Colby's long career, including helping get a democratic
government propped up in Italy in the wake of World War II, when Communism seemed a foregone conclusion for that
country; the increasing militarization in Vietnam, where Colby and his family lived for several years, and the disastrous
coup which ended in the murders of the Diem family; and the momentous effects the Watergate scandal rippled out into
the CIA, leading to Colby's now infamous testimony before Congress in the 1970s about the notorious "Family Jewels"
program, a set of grillings that Colby
approached as a trip to the Confessional in church.
What's oddly lacking here, perhaps by design, is more information about the Colby family. While that's obviously part of
Carl Colby's central thesis, it's especially odd that more time isn't spent on the death of Catherine Colby, Carl's sister
whose epilepsy and anorexia nervosa led to her early demise. There's more information about this in some of the
supplemental features, but it was evidently a major trauma for everyone involved (though William tamped down his
responses at the time), and it might have helped humanize the subject here to have had a little bit more time spent on
this particular facet of a very convoluted and complex persona.
The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of
First Run Features with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This is a typical documentary that offers a lot of archival
footage that is in various stages of disrepair, and so appropriate expectations must be set for those elements, which in
some cases are sourced from formats as small as 8mm. Getting past that, however, one is greeted by a really solid looking
high definition presentation that offers excellent fine detail in the talking heads segments and nice reproductions of a lot of
archival photographs which trace Colby's life and career. Colors are nicely saturated in the color sequences (a lot of this
documentary is in black and white), and overall the image is decently sharp and detailed.
The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby has two lossless audio options, a DTS-
HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix and a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo fold down, though truth be told, you'll be hard
pressed to notice any major difference between these two offerings. By far the largest bulk of this documentary is either
Carl Colby's narration or talking heads offering pronouncements on William Colby, his life and career, so there's simply no
opportunity for a surround mix to take advantage of any immersive qualities. A couple of post-looped sound effects (like
gunfire in some of the Vietnam sequences) subtly open up the sound field, but it's frankly a very slight difference. Fidelity is
just fine here, though there's negligible dynamic range since so much of this soundtrack is simply people talking.
Carl Colby Interviewed by James Reston, Jr. (HD; 21:13). Colby has the tables turned on him by journalist
Reston, and reveals a lot of background about his father that isn't necessarily gone into in the documentary itself. There's
a hint of bitterness in some of these anecdotes and memories, as Colby père doesn't come across as an especially
nurturing figure. It's interesting to hear Carl talk about his epileptic sister and how the irrationality of that disease was the
kind of problem that the elder Colby couldn't deal with, probably because he couldn't "solve" it.
Extra Scenes (HD; 32:08) contains six extra segments that discuss such things as what it's like to actually be a
spy and perhaps more importantly what it's like to actually work for the CIA.
Photo Gallery (HD) features some fantastic photos going back as far as William Colby's childhood.
William E. Colby/CIA Timeline is a text-based supplement that begins with Colby's birth on January 4, 1920, hits
several of his major intelligence missions, and ends with his death and burial in 1996.
With no pun intended, The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby isn't really a hit
job by son Carl Colby, but it's also a no hold barred, warts and all look at a very conflicted man who had, as they say,
issues. Colby fils is probably no better reconciled to his distant father than he was when he began this
documentary, but at least he's provided the rest of us with an absolutely fascinating portrait of one of the more important,
yet lesser known, figures of mid-twentieth century politics. This Blu-ray offers solid video and audio, and has some
appealing supplements. Recommended.
The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby Blu-ray, News and Updates
On April 17th, independent distributors First Run Features will release on Blu-ray Carl Colby's documentary film The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby (2011). The film is a son's riveting look at a father whose life seemed straight ...
The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby Blu-ray Screenshots
