Bigger Than Life

Nicholas Ray was one of the greatest directors to come out of Hollywood. His movies are always about something and that something has a cinematic flair that makes the experience thought provoking and thoroughly entertaining. Here is Cortisone the excuse for a slap in the face of a society that was getting more complacent and more spoiled with an avalanche of "new" things coming to overwhelm our daily lives. "We're dull, we're all dull" tells James Mason to his wife. Barbara Rush is superb as a Donna Reed type with a monster in the house. James Mason, a few years away from Lolita, also produced this rarely seen classic and gives a performance of daring highs. Highly recommended to movie lovers everywhere.

"We are dabbling in the unknown with dangerously potent tools." That is from the magazine article on which this film is based: "Ten Feet Tall," by Berton Roueché, from his brilliant "Annals of Medicine" series in The New Yorker (10 September 1955). Before I watched this Nicholas Ray film for the 2nd time, I read the original article and was quite astonished to find that the film is both faithful and unfaithful to the truth, and in surprising ways.

The most stunning thing is how quickly Ed (James Mason) is affected by the cortisone he is given to treat his rare and dire disease, a typically fatal inflammation of the arteries. I doubted that the derangement that made him feel "ten feet tall" would have happened as quickly as in the movie, which needs to get the plot going.

Well, I was wrong. The Long Island teacher on whom the article was based had a psychotic break almost as soon as he started taking the corticosteroid. The entire episode of his psychosis lasted only three weeks, but during that time, he was a terrifying presence. His threatening, dictatorial behavior toward his wife and son, not to mention his colleagues, were, yes, exaggerated for dramatic effect (especially the scorn he heaps on his wife), but Mason's portrayal is strikingly close to the real teacher's experience: the madly impulsive spending, the manic speeches and wild philosophical brainstorms, as well as his demand to be absolute ruler in his home and his unveiled contempt for everyone because they're all fools, except him.

James Mason, Barbara Rush, and Walter Matthau do solid work, as does Christopher Olsen, a child actor who also worked with Hitchcock, Cukor, and Sirk. Much has been said about Nicholas Ray's choices as director, and what interests me most is the ways he chose to be unfaithful to the original story.

First, location. Although the actual teacher lived in Forest Hills in Queens, "Bigger than Life" is set in a nameless suburbia, and it was filmed it in color for the big screen even though it's a domestic drama of the sort that was still shot in black-and-white at the time. Much has been made of those two choices, which are taken to be a commentary on stifling, conformist suburban lives in the 1950s. But I think Ray's decision to move it to a more typical American landscape than New York City, and to treat it as a big-screen color feature, had to do with the dramatic weight of the subject: drugs that save lives can cripple them at the same time, and the film has strong references to the deep shame that was (and to some extent still is) attached to mental illness. The wife won't even hear the word psychiatrist.

Second, the doctors. In the movie, Ed tricks doctors and druggists to increase his intake of cortisone-- if he feels ten feet tall on one pill, why not take two? In the true story, it was the doctor who increased the dosage, but did not schedule frequent follow-ups, even though he knew the risks from side effects. That's a much more damning situation than a mentally ill outpatient doubling his own dosage. So why shift the blame from doctor to patient in the movie? Here's a possibility: There was concern about blowback from pharmaceutical companies and/or the American Medical Association. But on the whole, I can see why "Bigger Than Life" has come to be so highly regarded, if not sufficiently well known.

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

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

Back in 1956 this must have been a very daring flick indeed. Of course it has dated and today it packs less of a punch but it still remains a very sincere film anchored by a superb James Mason performance. Walter Matthau is similarly top rate though in a smaller and less flashy role. The direction is absolutely mesmerizing and I only felt slightly uneasy about the psychiatric approach of the day and the flashing red screen reflecting Mason's mental disintegration which was so in fashion in films of the time.

Even so, it was not enough to spoil the pleasure afforded by the many good aspects in this movie that I found quite riveting and intelligent for the most part. The bit where Mason snips the phone cord is as frightening as it is memorable, to me the highpoint of a honest yet never predictable work.