I’m trying to come up with a name for a movie I saw around two and a half years ago at the Northeast Silent Film Festival (the theme that year was gender roles).
I don’t remember the exact details about the beginning, but there’s a man who’s either been fired or demoted or something like that, and he no longer makes enough money to support his family (wife and two young children). After exhausting all employment options, he figures out that, if he were dead, his life insurance would comfortably support his family for several years–at least long enough for the wife to remarry.
It can’t look like suicide, though, so he climbs onto the roof of their house under the guise of doing some sort of repair, and he flings himself off of it. He paralyzes himself from the waist down, but survives the fall. He then slides into a rather deep depression.
The wife goes to work, getting her old job back from before she married, I think. She quickly excels in her work and climbs up in the company, eventually making more than the husband used to. Meanwhile, the husband finds happiness in looking after the children and starts to get over his depression.
So, end of the first act and everything’s going swimmingly, but then catastrophe strikes when the husbands starts to recover feeling in his legs. There’s the dilemma: if he recovers, society mandates he’ll have to go back to whatever menial work he can get, his wife will have to quit her career, he’ll have to leave the kids, they’ll be destitute, and he’ll be miserable; but to keep things the way they are, he’ll have to pretend to be crippled for the rest of his life.
And I don’t recall how it ends. I know he keeps it a secret for a while, at least, and I recall a scene where he pleads with his doctor after a checkup not to tell anybody, but after that, I’m drawing a blank.
