The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby Blu-ray Movie Review

The Cold Spy Who Never Came In.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 7, 2012

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 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• 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.

The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.