Bigger Than Life (1956)

B. Kite via Criterion Collection:

The film has often been read as a critique of nuclear family values, and the case is powerful and persuasive. Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it concisely: “Bigger Than Life is a profoundly upsetting exposure of middle-class aspirations because it virtually defines madness—Avery’s drug-induced psychosis—as taking those values seriously. Each emblem of the American dream implicitly honored by Avery in the opening scenes (his ideas about education, his respect for class and social status, his desire for his son ‘to improve himself’) is systematically turned on its head, converted from dream to nightmare, by becoming only more explicit in his behavior.”

Bigger Than Life, then, might be said to pose the question, What would happen if the patriarch returned as an archetype, in all his inexplicable strength? Ed tries on a number of patriarch roles in the film, but they all prove too small. He’s the cheery father of the Oldsmobile ads when he takes his family on their shopping expedition, but somehow his forced smile and slightly sweaty face push past the smug comfort that’s a prerequisite for the part. Ed the athlete fares no better, defeated by the degeneracy of his offspring. Ed the instructor puts in long hours but winds up thwarted by the meddling of his inadequate wife. The church service offers yet another possibility—the forgiving father who welcomes the return of his prodigal son—but Ed rejects such “fuzzy-minded” permissiveness almost instantly, flipping to the Old Testament to find a father with a stiffer spine.


He lands, of course, on Abraham, Kierkegaard’s “father of faith.” In fact, Kierkegaard anticipates Bigger Than Life, and specifically the disjunctive tones of its climax, in Fear and Trembling. Pondering the challenge to ethics offered by the story of Abraham and Isaac, he wonders what would happen if the story of God’s demand was overheard by the wrong party, say “a man suffering from sleeplessness”: “then the most terrifying, the most profound, tragic, and comic misunderstanding is close at hand . . . The tragic and comic make contact here in absolute infinitude.” This contact occurs in the film, too, in the uneasy admixture of horror-movie lighting, loud carnival music, and an awkward, almost slapstick tussle that tips over the couch in its course through the living room, only to right it again on the return journey.

It may be, though, that the cosmic scope of the film’s blasphemy has yet to be fully appreciated. What Ed is finally proposing, in all the rigor of his madness, is a rewriting of the New Testament—a sort of inverse Crucifixion. He realizes that killing his son is a morally abhorrent act, but he sees also that his son seems destined to bring every sort of chaos into the world. Such circumstances demand the greatest sacrifice of all, the sacrifice of himself. Or Himself, since Ed has finally grown to such a stature that the only role scaled to his contours is that of God the Father. Somewhere in suburbia, the order of creation is turning over.

The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

Nora's night.  

Via San Francisco Chronicle 

Christopher Boyce, the Cold War traitor whose spying for the Russians was chronicled in the film "The Falcon and the Snowman," is free after spending almost half his life in federal prison.

Boyce, 50, was paroled at 4 a.m. Friday from a halfway house he hated in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. He will remain on parole until Aug. 15, 2046, his original release date.

It was not immediately clear where Boyce was headed, but he recently married a San Francisco woman he met several years ago. Boyce, an intensely private man who shuns the media, could not be reached for comment.
Boyce was 22 when his father, a former FBI agent, helped him land a job at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach. He eventually gained access to the "Black Box" vault that held communications with CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Boyce and his childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee -- they had been altar boys together -- soon started selling classified intelligence documents to the Russian Embassy in Mexico City.

They sold thousands of documents, compromising a sensitive satellite system and damaging negotiations over nuclear weapons treaties, over the course of a year. They were paid $77,000 before they were caught.

Boyce was convicted of espionage in 1977; Lee also was convicted of espionage and was paroled in 1998.

In 1997, Boyd persuaded the U.S. Parole Commission to grant him early release. After spending almost half of his life in various federal prisons, Boyce was released in September from a medium-security prison in Sheridan, Ore. , and sent to a halfway house in San Francisco.

He made headlines in 1980 when he escaped from federal prison in Lompoc; he remained on the run for 19 months and supported himself by robbing banks in the Pacific Northwest.

But it was the 1985 film "The Falcon and the Snowman" that cemented his fame. The film starred Timothy Hutton as Boyce, who loved falconry, and Sean Penn as Lee, nicknamed "Snowman" because of a drug habit.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/03/15/MN205136.DTL#ixzz0nZd6eGX9

Just the facts at Crime Library:

Christopher Boyce was paroled March 14, 2003. The graying 50-year-old, who had spent 25 years in prison, was released from a halfway house in San Francisco, California. He will remain on parole until his original release date of 2046.

Perhaps part of Boyce's preparation for parole can be seen in the fifteen opinion pieces he published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune while being held at Minnesota's state prison at Oak Park Heights (OPH) from 1988 to 1999.  It was here that he publicly expressed remorse for his spying. However, that remorse seemed to be more for the pain he had caused his former FBI agent father than the damage he had done to his country.

Boyce wrote, "Espionage was a cruel wound to inflict on a father who loved me.  "He noted that the end of the Cold War showed that the "titanic struggle of the age is over — and I am drowning in the realization that I chose the wrong path."  But Boyce also acknowledged that it was "impossible for me to ever be patriotic in a nationalistic sense."

Boyce wrote columns decrying the gang-related violence that infests prison life and championing education and conjugal visits as vital to rehabilitation.  He also wrote poignantly of his yearning for nature.  "The one punishment at OPH that cuts me deepest is my removal from the world of nature," Boyce asserted. "Each cell is like a concrete womb. There are no trees here in the penitentiary, but treetops are visible far beyond the walls.  Sometimes I watch the distant branches sway in the wind. I have not got close to a tree in 14 years, and my memories of them are fading away in my mind like the features of my long-dead grandfather."

Interview with John Schlesinger:

TA: The whole fantasy thing is another thread through many of your films. And the notion of "the big idea gone awry." Certainly in Midnight Cowboy, but Billy Liar also is a great fantasizer about what he might be. And Falcon and the Snowman, with the notion of "I know I can help my country get back on the right course...if I just commit this little treason." What is it about the fantasy theme and your obvious view that you're doomed to fail if you have these big ideas?

JS: See, I don't believe it's failure. I don't think the Cowboy fails. I think he succeeds in bettering the possibilities of Ratso. I'm much more optimistic than you give me credit for. Now Billy Liar, admittedly, he doesn't have the courage to follow his dream, and therefore resorts to his own private fantasy. Falcon is a rather different animal. I think what appealed to me about Falcon, and perhaps it is cynical, was that it was a sort of black farce, partly, about much-touted American security, which can be easily circumvented. It dealt with a kind of misplaced idealism which I can understand, though I would never advocate taking revenge on your own country. Like the Oklahoma bombing, which may be a result of extreme frustration with federal institutions. I can't condone it but I understand why he might, in his cockamamie way, have thought that was the right thing for him to do. Fortunately the Falcon was shacked up with a partner who was a total fantasist, a drug addict, also a very interesting character, who ran rings around the whole establishment. I thought he was a wonderful farce, and I enjoyed that aspect of it, albeit with the tragic implications within it.