Bigger Than Life (1956)

How is it that I'd never heard of this movie before?

"Bigger Than Life" is a dream come true for those movie fans (I count myself among them) who love the decade of the 1950s for its total cinematic schizophrenia. I can't think of another decade that created whole omnibuses of films more strongly opposed to one another. It seems that half of the filmmakers of the 50s were churning out earnest Technicolor pap that tried to sell the American public a version of the 50s that simply didn't exist yet which everyone so desperately wanted to believe did, while the other half were making movies about everything that was wrong with the very version of America the other half was clinging to. If you're a fan of subtext in films, and especially interested in seeing how filmmakers could work within the conventions of a genre while turning those conventions against themselves, the 50s are your decade. And for the ultimate master of subtext, look no further than Nicholas Ray.

There isn't a Ray film I've seen that isn't dripping in subtext, socio-political, sexual, gender-based, you name it. "Bigger Than Life" stars a towering James Mason as a family man who's turned into a literal monster when he becomes addicted to a drug that helps keep a life-threatening medical problem at bay. The film goes to some jaw-dropping places, especially toward the end, as Mason's character evolves from protector to worst nightmare and the picture-perfect family life depicted in the earlier parts of the film dissolve before our very eyes. However, Ray's point all along is that that picture-perfect family never really existed in the first place, and the drug on which Mason gets hooked brings out the "id" in him and the family dynamic that's been lurking there all along.

Ray was the rare director who could make the saturated Technicolor and massive Cinemascope aspect ratios of 1950s filmmaking work to his advantage and serve his artistic purposes, rather than simply be used to photograph pretty gowns and landscapes. In fact, despite its Cinemascope grandeur, "Bigger Than Life" is all about cramped interiors -- offices, bedrooms, one's own feverish mind -- and the skeletons in the closets, real and imagined, that are hiding there.

Grade: A

Fmovies: I don't know much about cortisone, but from seeing Nicholas Ray's film Bigger Than Life I can have to guess that unless there have been some major medical breakthroughs in the 50 years since this came out, it should have a very huge warning label on the bottle. But it isn't really about cortisone, per-say, even as it does make its case convincingly for the times that such new drugs to possibly help save lives become a double-edged sword. The drug could be anything, it's merely a catalyst for character and story to go into completely un-bound turns. The Avery family could, in fact, be a Beaver-Cleaver household of the fifties, where 'father knows best' is often a given and the house is as beautiful and elegant- in its suburban middle-class way- as is the outward appearances of the husband, wife and son. But the same catalyst, for the intents and purposes of the changes in all the characters, is utterly fascinating. I couldn't help but actually care about these people, as their sort of sheltered existence became un-covered like some kind of manhole into some metaphoric sewer that many of us sit in. There is something under the surface, and it's one wrong thing that can make it go awry.

Ed Avary (James Mason) is such a man, who is a school-teacher and cab-driver operator (on the side, keeping from his wife). He starts getting 'episodes', and has to go to the hospital. It's discovered that he has to live with a heart condition for the rest of his life, and only a new experimental drug, cortisone, can help with regular doses. It doesn't take too long though for things to start going south with Ed, and at first it just seems like he's a little more ornery, a little more on edge, but seemingly trying to still be the old Ed. But then there's his new school-teaching system, and the inducing and steadily increasing paranoia lifting the fog for him what his marriage really means. "I'm only staying now for the boy!" he says in a rage at the dinner table. It becomes clear that he's in the psychosis state, in doing too much of the cortisone, and it lifts not only the comfort of this life, but the expectations and ideals of this seemingly calm, perfunctory existence.

There were other pictures around this time being made in Hollywood, within but at the same time under the conventional radars (Sirk comes to mind, though still unseen by me). Bigger Than Life is a great example of this, and Ray and Mason get right to the bones of it in the main chunk of the picture. Early on though its interesting to see how the tranquility is set up, and how the first barbs of bad things to come is sort of shielded over, to seem like it's nothing, like it'll be all OK. But the implications that both director and star raise through what they deliver through the material is staggering. On Ray's side, he accentuates things exceptionally by the deception of appearances; it may be a studio-film, with the usual medium-shots and high-glossy lighting and camera moves, yet there's some room for expression, like the shadow that looms over Avary's son during an ultra-tense study session. His command over the style is shown here as one of his finest and, at times, even understated. Though finally in the climax he goes full-throttle, in a scene of (possible) horror that's given the full subjective treatment.

Mason, meanwhile, is really at the top of his game, and it's extremely terrifying to see not just how far he can go into losing all touch with his ow

Bigger Than Life does to cortisone what Reefer Madness did to cannabis. Based on a true report published in The New Yorker, it's an exasperatingly schizoid movie that seems on the verge of boiling over into scalding social satire but stays within the safe confines of its premise – or its gimmick.

Schoolteacher James Mason lives a self-admittedly `dull' life trying to provide for wife Barbara Rush and their son by moonlighting as a cab dispatcher (a fact which he keeps secret but which ends up having no impact on the plot). He's also hiding a series of incapacitating attacks until he's diagnosed with a rare arterial disease, for which the treatment is the new `miracle' drug cortisone.

It works so well he starts popping it compulsively, and soon he's skittering along a grandiose, manic parabola: Tossing around his old college pigskin inside the house, buying haute couture for the mousy Rush, spouting crackpot theories on child-rearing at PTA meetings. Next he's forging prescriptions, whipping his son into shape by withholding meals until the dunce gets his math homework right, and planning a Biblical sacrifice.

The original article had to have focused on the drug's side effects – how its use or misuse can cause psychotic symptoms among some patients. But what should have been a documentary got pumped up into a color potboiler. Somewhere along the way it, like Mason, took leave of its senses – it's like Father Knows Best: The Episode From Hell.

Not only does everyone realize that Mason's flamboyantly deranged, they know why: the cortisone. But in the rigid world of middle-class conformity appearances are paramount, so they act as if nothing is amiss. So even when Mason is tearing around after their son with a pair of scissors while ranting about Abraham and Issac, Rush is still humoring him and whispering into the telephone. She has no trouble eating the faces off his doctors (a detail that's out of character), but with her lord and master she might as well be a Stepford Wife.

Is this a case of Illness-as-Metaphor? Under cover of a drug-scare movie, is Bigger Than Life really a guerrilla assault at patriarchal America in the 1950s? If so, it pulls too many punches (or had its punches pulled for it). As it survives, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life does take a lurid look at a terrifying disorder: Codependency.

Bigger Than Life fmovies. This film, much like the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, has far more going on than meets the eye. James Mason's character, after getting whacked out of Cortizone (a "Miracle Drug") indeed becomes hysterical and abusive. But he was made ill in the first place by the strain caused his intensely driven lifestyle, where he kept two jobs to finance his family's social and financial ascent.

What the viewer has to watch for is what his character says during his cortizone-induced delusions. His criticisms of his wife, kid, PTA and society in general are over-the-top, but essentially valid. It's a classic narrative device: by allowing a main character a way out of societal responsibility and place (In this case, being bombed on Cortizone), he is allowed to comment on and criticize American society directly without actually threatening the status quo. and in the case of 1950s America, that's a monolithic status quo to criticize.

James Mason becomes "Bigger than Life" in this 1956 Nicholas Ray film that also stars Barbara Rush and Walter Matthau. Mason plays Ed Avery, a schoolteacher who also is a part-time cab dispatcher. He is suffering from severe spasms that are getting worse. He learns that he has a terminal illness that perhaps can be cured with a steroid, cortisone. He is helped, but he also begins to suffer from mood swings and depression and, as he takes more and more, veers completely out of control. Barbara Rush plays his suffering wife, and Walter Matthau is a family friend and coworker.

I actually had a family member who went into profound depressions because of continuing to take black market cortisone, so this film resonated with me. Mason, who produced the film, is terrifying. Barbara Rush is very good, though her character puts up with an awful lot before she makes a move. Matthau is good in a supporting role, but roles showcasing his true strengths as an actor were a few years away.

This is much more than a cautionary tale about steroids, which need to be taken and tapered off very carefully. In his cortisone-induced mindset, Ed Avery spouts off on the problems in society, very unusual in the repressed '50s. His ideas are a tad over the top, but there's a good kernel in them. Ray always did well with a rebellious mindset.

This is an excellent movie. I saw it once, and I never wish to see it again. I grew up in a household like this, only there was never a solution to my father's mania, depression, and incredible anger.

About all I can say about Mr Mason's performance, and that of Ms Rush, is that they could have been my parents, and I could have been that kid. It never got to the point where I was offered up like Isaac, but the rest of it was right, right down to the speech where the father condemns all children because they're ignorant. I'd heard that one. His wife was helpless; they all are.

I do not know where the screenwriters got their dialog, but I hope they didn't learn it the way I did. As it happened, I was terrified and transfixed while watching it, only calming down after the father realized that something was wrong, and vowed to correct it, and there was a means of correcting it.

When the movie was over--I don't know if I watched it in the theater or on TV--I had to go home, where there was still rage, and no solution to it. I would have been nine years old.

There was a time that I wanted my parents to see that movie, in the hope that they'd realize that this was how they acted, and stop it.

It never happened. They were divorced years later. My father was angry and crazy right up to the day he died three years ago. My mother, in her nursing home in Cleveland, maintains that I must be making it all up.

M Kinsler