Bigger Than Life

James Mason produced the movie, suggesting to me that it was he who got this very noncommercial property filmed and released. It's a top-notch cast directed by cult favorite Nicholas Ray, but the material is a decided downer despite the originality. There were several films out at the time dealing with drug addiction (e.g. Hatful of Rain, Man with the Golden Arm). This, however, is the only one I know dealing with addiction to a prescription drug, Cortisone. Since similar attachments have spread over the decades, the theme has come to anticipate a more general social problem. Thus, its relevance carries over even for today's audiences.

Mason plays Ed Avery, a high-school teacher and normal family man. I like the way the screenplay works in the fact that he can't support a family on a teacher's income, and so has a second job as a cabbie. As a result, his day is filled from dawn to dusk. Small wonder, then, that he begins suffering blackouts, which doctors diagnose as a rare arterial disorder. (It's not made clear what has caused the problem. Overwork? Genetics?) A new drug, Cortisone, is prescribed for an indefinite period of usage. Up to now, Ed has been a friendly, well-liked family man and co-worker. So it's a harrowing trajectory to watch him go through increasingly intense periods of mental breakdown as a side effect of the new drug.

It's an excruciating descent into delusions of grandeur and megalomania, with few efforts at softening the agony. As the delusions mount, Ed abusively lectures a PTA meeting, berates and condemns his wife (Rush), becomes a Nazi-like taskmaster to his son (Olsen), and even tries to re-enact Abraham's sacrifice of son Isaac. Now, there were many so-called scary B- movies out at the time. But none, I believe, are any scarier than Mason's portrayal of the ravaged high-school teacher. Probably half the audience went home to check their medicine chest.

The only fault I find is with wife Lou's behavior. In my book, she's too passive to be believable in the face of the growing ordeal, especially as her son is affected. Ray brings out an unusual but expected degree of intensity in Mason's performance, with another of his trademarks centering on the action around the family staircase, perhaps symbolizing the mounting madness. Also, I wouldn't be surprised that Ray and Mason took a cut in pay to get the project made. The only concession to commercialism that I can spot is the expected 1950's ending, which nonetheless is more a relief than a disappointment—a tribute, I think, to the caliber of what's there on screen. Anyway, the movie comes across as an unusual and searing melodrama, prescient for its time.

Ed Avery (James Mason) is a school teacher with loving wife Lou (Barbara Rush) and son Richie. Pat Wade and Wally Gibbs (Walter Matthau) are his friends fellow teachers. He starts blacking out from terrible pains. Hospital doctors diagnose him with a rare disease and give him experimental cortisone treatment. He makes a remarkable recovery and given cortisone tablets to take. His personality starts to change and he begins to abuse the pills.

The subject matter of prescription drug abuse is prescient although the madness is sometimes reminiscent of the old educational films of the dangers of marijuana. The 50's nuclear family does keep this mired in an old fashion style. Nevertheless, it is very admirable to see this issue tackled. The widescreen CinemaScope does something interesting to the interior scenes. When the walls on both sides of the room can be seen, it pulls the audience inside the rooms. The characters and their story becomes even more immediate.

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.

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

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