User reviews

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

A fast moving gutsy view of what happens within a family when one member becomes manic, in this case from prescription drug addiction/ abuse. A subject that only became widely talked about years and years after this groung breaking film. Pointed out as the last film director Ray made that was set in "modern" times. The end of a cycle for him and one that was personal to Ray who struggled with addictions and troubled home life.

There are two other reviewers who need a bit of a lashing. One innocently enough thinks that Barbara Rush, is Barbara Bel Geddes. Another one thinks the situation of the home craziness being kept at home is wrong and unreal of dated. Sorry Charlie, you've got some of your facts about the plot wrong and you've never seen this kind of craziness.

I've personally seen this kind of Manic behavior in real life and this is one of the best, probably the best representation of it ever on the screen, including the religious mania aspects. If you find these aspects funny, they are in their horrible absurdity, very true to the way these manias attach themselves to Manic Depressive behavior. This movie mostly concentrates on the manic side of it.

Definitely worth seeing on the big screen or in widescreen. James Mason is a good as he ever was, and he was awfully good many times. This is a great movie on many levels and his performance is one of the best put on film. What restraints were forced on the movie by the era it was made in, actually make it better and more scary than a film which can show vomiting and other drug side effects. This is psychologically horrifying. This emotional craziness is grim enough on its own and makes it all about the drama of the situation rather than the hype and tabloid parts.

The scenes with the son dealing with his own father's behavior are especially unsettling and moving. The whole cast is good. Matthau fans will find him perhaps not getting to show all he can do here,but he's good as the buddy character.

Pretty much everything works in this film, you can pull symbols out of it if you want, there are plenty to find, but it plays out as fascinating reality.

This films reputation is good, but it needs to be more widely seen.

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 (1956)

Tightly made, vividly acted film about a contemporary crisis--the use and abuse of a new "miracle" drug. Watching James Mason suffer, and then make other people suffer, and then face the final bells of his life, is half the movie. He's such a uniquely subtle and powerful actor (at the same time), always filled with poise and a whiff of kindly diffidence.

In a way, this is a precursor to the recent movie idea in "Limitless," where a drug makes you "bigger than life," though this is no fantasy. The drug here is cortisone, ingested orally. It had been understood as a natural (adrenal gland) steroid hormone and was manufactured (by Merck) and on the market by around 1950. And by 1956 when this movie came out it was considered a new kind of penicillin, but rather than just be an antibiotic, it seemed to just make you stronger against all kinds of ailments, especially those that involved swelling of some kind.

Director Nicholas Ray does his usual wonders with interpersonal drama and makes this quite believable, as well as dramatic, and Joe MacDonald does his usual wonders with the camera-work. The writing, too, is crisp and believable (both Ray and Mason helped with the screenplay). In all, it's a top shelf production and a great story.

But it fails somehow to be a great film, and I think the main reason is the hook to the plot, about the wonder drug, is a little too neatly packaged, with a few scenes that are almost like public service announcements. We sort of know before we are "supposed" to know that it's going to go bad--the clues go beyond foreshadowing--and so when we find out we are right, the edge is off of the narrative. Only the very end is left hanging, though you figure, with Merck keeping an eye on things, that events really can't go too wrong. According to Wikipedia, the American response at the time was shock and the movie did poorly (I guess because it looked like an attack on the nuclear family, such was the 1950s).

But the critics loved it then and like it now. A movie this well made is still a thrill to watch for all the small things--Walter Matthau in a caricatured side role as the good Uncle, the psychological effects as manifest in Mason, and even the glimpse into the attitude toward medicine at the time. I don't think it's a typical reaction to cortisone, however (from what I've read)--this is a particular case where some inherent manic-depression is triggered, and exaggerated. It would be interesting to see this re-calibrated and filmed again in modern times, but with the subtlety here, the destruction of an ordinary family without shameless excess.

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.

Admittedly, if this movie had been made today, it would be much different. However, since it was made in the 1950's, the family had a "Leave It To Beaver" feel about it--a mother at home and in a dress while doing housework, a son that adores his father and wants to be just like him, and a father doing his best to support his family. However, when the father, a school teacher, passes out from intense pain, he finds out that he has rare disease that is fatal. The doctor, though, has an experimental drug that he would like to use. The father agrees and he is put on cortisone. The experiment works and the father is able to return to teaching. Eventually, he becomes addicted and even psychotic which leads to some serious threats to the family.

I did not intend to watch this movie when it came on, but as it progressed I wanted to see how the film would conclude. At times, I felt frustrated that the wife did not do more to stop her husband from doing harm to himself and his family. But then, it was the 50's, an era that women were portrayed very differently from today.

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.

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 own reality, but the reality of the usual in distortion. Even through the cortisone, Mason has this character come off at first as a braggart, but sort of believable at a PTA meeting (Matthau's gym teacher friend finds something fishy though), and then it doesn't take too long for him to plunge head first into his dementia. A small scene like the one where he gets an extra prescription from his doctor, however, also shows his subtleties. Barbara Rush is also very good as his wife Lou, who as an actress successfully strips away the layers of the very kind, warm, and utmost dutiful wife, and has to actually, finally take charge of things, and do things she wouldn't possibly dream usually, like deception. The son, played by Christopher Olson, might be the weakest link of the three, as he has a character who is, of course, just a boy, and even more put to the extreme test by his father's downward spiral. Even with that it's still a believable turn.

It's a piece of subversion that works all the better because of the hidden ambiguities of the ending. The whole facade of things *seemingly* being this way or another, is like one big joke on the audience. But it's not really a funny one; Ray is in your face with his audience, and it's not in a retrospect way either. Things are not all honky-dory in the Eisenhower era, is what Ray says at the core, and at the end it can hardly be read that everything will turn out well for the family. The implications made are much more stronger and lasting than the actual perceived outcome. Will things be under control with the Avary's? Who knows, is what Ray is saying, or that maybe we can learn from mistakes. But the fact that the facade came down like an avalanche is the point. It's even more surprising then to know that this picture is only available on bootlegs, through certain vendors, only occasionally on TV. If you can find it though, it's a real little ruby of a studio picture.

Nicholas Ray is one of those classic 50's directors who has a huge cult, even though he only made a handful of excellent films. Experimenting with drugs, a study of the patriarch family and of boring suburban people and mid-life crises, Ray weaved an extremely controversial, yet superb and disenchanted melodrama. Memorable for many brilliant expressions of terrifying drama, lurid colour, a cult director at one of his greatest points, a risqué story which mounts the devastating critique on the materialistic, middle-class society during post-war America, and showing off the brilliant British actor Mr. James Mason, (who also produced such a fascinating time period study) who in a perfectly cast role, gives one of his greatest performances.

Before I dig into the pros, which I will likely explain Ray and Mason's perfect touches, and cons, which the film does have, I must first explain the harrowing and interestingly risqué dramatic story, which Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum controversially put together.

Bigger Than Life stars the brooding James Mason (perfectly cast, in a role only he could play that strong) as a small-town teacher beset by worries about money and middle-age. He suffers from a rare disease and is prescribed cortisone, a type of steroids, but he becomes addicted to the sense of well being and bigger than life feeling it brings. The overdose of the drug and the inability to stop taking it, turns him into a neurotic, megalomaniac tyrant to his loving and sensitive wife, (played with warmth by Barbara Rush) scared, innocent son (Christopher Olson) and everyone else around him.

A profoundly radical Hollywood movie, the distinguished not only by its distaste for suburban notions of 'normality' but by the change of society and middle-class life during the postwar 50's. The film has an unbelievably raw and dramatic darkly moving score by David Raskin, and the beautifully nightmarish clarity of Bigger Than Life's intense colour scope and realistic dark colourful imagery is always a pleasure to watch. An extremely controversial film, the lighting, sets make the middle- class and small-town 'normal' community and family realistically shown, as well as heighten the melodramatic terrifying drug story and script.

Inspired by a New Yorker article by Berton Roueche, the screenplay warns against quick-fix solutions like the cortisone that transforms Mason's ailing teacher into a psychotic tyrant. The dialogue is fine and the film has some brilliantly scripted melodramatic moments and terrifying sequences. Sure, the films beginning is quite slow and the movie may wander off and grow too dramatic at some points, but its still such a provocative and extremely important study on middle-class suburban life and the effect of drugs and overdoses on a perfectly normal man.

James Mason gives such a terrifying, dark performance as Ed Avery. Barbara Rush is great, playing off warm and sensitivity and Walter Matthau is also well-casted in a rare dramatic role. Yet the supporting cast, screenplay and technical aspects are all out shined by the brilliant inventive performance from Mr. Mason. Perfectly showing the before and after character and emotion of Ed Avery, Mason is perfect in every sequence, both a sensitive and pitiful hero, as well as a vicious and tyrannical villain, tearing apart his and his family's life by his improper use of a dangerous drug. In every scene, mason gives just the perfect amount of touching emotion, terrifying Hyde-like power and memorable freed from inhibitions raw power, dominating the screen.

One of the most intriguing and raw filmmakers ever to be out in Hollywood, Nicholas Ray's follow-up to Rebel Without a Cause may not be as consecutively entertaining, brilliant or versatile to watch, but it's equally as important. In Bigger Than Life, Ray uses the lush and lurid horrifying colour cinematography, to show a realistic nightmare. Perfectly composing the suburban community and notions of 'normality,' Ray gives some terrific angles, terrific set-ups and excellent movement to show the story and develop the raw Mason. Collaborating together, Mason and Ray are perfect together and put together a controversial, yet extremely important and entertaining raw melodrama, which is in fact a masterpiece.

Bigger Than Life is directed by Nicholas Ray and stars James Mason (who also co-wrote and produced the film), Barbara Rush & Walter Matthau. It's about a school teacher and family man whose life spins out of control after he is diagnosed with a serious life threatening illness that leads to him becoming addicted to cortisone.

A box office flop on release, the film was considered controversial with its attack on the nuclear family residing in conformist suburbia. Yet today many modern day critics, coupled with high praise dealt by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard & François Truffaut, has given the film a new lease of life. So much so it's considered by some to be an ahead of its time masterpiece. While I personally think that masterpiece is a bit too strong a statement, there is no denying that Ray's movie is a potent piece of work backed up by yet another magnificent turn from James Mason.

Excellently adapted by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum from a New Yorker article written by Berton Roueché, the film is also technically smart. Shot in Cinemascope, Ray & cinematographer Joseph MacDonald brilliantly use bold colours and expressionistic shadows around the domestic home to convey atmosphere and meaning. But it's with the story, and its subsequent interpretations that Bigger Than Life soars high on the interest scale. There's many musings on it available at the click of a mouse, from critics prepared to go deep with it, to a thought process delivered by the genius that was Truffaut himself. They are there if one is inclined to peruse either prior or post viewing of this most intriguing picture.

Me? I have my own thoughts, but that's the point, and the thrill of diving into a film of this type. To form ones own interpretation and to then open up to other perspectives is one of cinemas great little peccadilloes. See this if you can. 7.5/10

As a person who spent 46 years 'addicted' to Prednisone, I can totally relate to what James Mason's character is going through. The rage, the self illusion, the psychosis, are all part of the experience so wonderfully portrayed by Mason and the other actors.

This movie is far better than the reception and reviews indicate. It's not only truthful but the script and direction catapult it above the norm.

I finally caught up with this film at the National Film Theatre after missing it at least twice on late-night television broadcasts -- and I suppose by that point I had inflated expectations. But I'm afraid I actually felt rather let down.

Praised for its 'taut' 95-minute length and lauded as a 'searing critique' of 1950s American middle-class society, "Bigger than Life" certainly wasn't supposed to be boring; and it does indeed have a tense psychotic climax near the end. It did seem to take an awfully long time to get there, though, and judging by overheard conversation on the way out, the snoring from the row behind, and the surreptitious rearrangements of limbs around me in the hot auditorium, I wasn't the only one to feel that way...

The film came across as falling between two stools; I wasn't certain if it was being presented as a realistic social drama or an exploitation horror/ thriller. Considered in the latter light, it would obviously carry an awful lot of tedious excess baggage, but as a social/medical exposé it seems massively overwrought, and the ending (studio-imposed?) sits ill with either. Moral issues of quality of life -- is it better to lose the patient physically or mentally? -- appear to be flirted with briefly and then abandoned in favour of all-out psycho thrills.

Under a different director, the material might have made for a good horror movie. With a different treatment I can see it as a 'social issues' film in the old style, like "The Black Legion" or "Dead End" (both of which are also effective thrillers in their own right)... and I can just about grasp how it has been portrayed as a black-comedy satire on an American family stereotype. But despite the presence of the talented James Mason (often looking bizarrely flattened as the film attempted to contort him into an ultra-widescreen frame that I found frankly off-putting -- perhaps the weird visual constructions were a deliberate attempt to set the viewers' world on edge?) I couldn't feel that the existing picture was really satisfactory in any of these fields, let alone in a theoretical synthesis of all of them.

I'd say that its most effective strand is probably in the treatment of the final weekend as straight-out chiller tension in the style of Kubrick's "The Shining", as the central character becomes increasingly irrational. (Kubrick's version in particular, since his adaptation shares the same issue in that it's hard to keep any audience sympathy for a character acting weirdly when you can't see inside his head -- he becomes pure monster, losing a potential dimension thereby.) Elsewhere, there seem to be too many elements tossed into the mix and then apparently abandoned: Ed's taxi work, the attractive young teacher, money issues (I'm sure there's supposed to be some sub-plot about the orange dress, but whatever that strand is boiling up to, it never appears on-screen), forging prescriptions, school and parent politics -- the film keeps on throwing fresh strands in with a scattergun effect, but doesn't tie them together. Maybe it's realism, in that real life doesn't match up to the neat significance of Chekhov's first-act gun: but as drama it left me feeling pulled through a hedge backwards.

Even if I've liked (Rebel Without A Cause) or disliked (In A Lonely Place, unfortunately) a Nicholas Ray film, there's no denying that they are rich experiences which make the most out of their material. Even though Bigger Than Life is clearly of its time it doesn't feel dated at all. In fact, it was recommended to me for the similarities in the protagonist and plot of Breaking Bad. What took me off guard at first with the film is the quick pacing, it made it extremely engaging, surpassing Rebel actually. The highlight is the rich cinematography. It can be a little on-the- nose with its symbolism, but it doesn't overshadow its purpose. However, the ending does leave on a little bit of a sour and unbelievable note, although the premise of the film requires a little suspension of belief anyway. Interesting premise well executed. I should check out more Ray, especially Johnny Guitar.

8/10

I disagree with the prevailing opinion that this film is, as la Sirk, a critique of 50s culture in the U. S. especially since the main criticizer, James Mason's cortisone addled school teacher, seems to be perceived by the film makers as a proto Fascist, elitist, control freak and not someone to whom we should pay heed. However, as a study of an addictive personality this Nicholas Ray work is powerful. Ed Avery, the little man who feels big whenever he pops a pill, joins a distinguished cast of sick, tormented Ray anti heroes such as Dixon Steele in "Lonely Place", Jim Wilson in "On Dangerous Ground", Jeff McCloud in "Lusty Men" and, of course, Jim Stark in "Rebel". Indeed, Mason's performance of a man who would dominate all before him is so dominating that the other characters tend to recede from consciousness. Even very strong thesps like Walter Matthau tend to be on the bland side when measured against Mason and as for average performers like Barbara Rush, they soon descend into the realm of the faintly dull which is, ironically, where Ed feels he is before the miracle drug comes along. So what we're left with is a memorable performance wrapped around a not so memorable movie which is probably why it bombed at the box office. Give it a B minus.

PS...Cortisone may be dangerous but it sure as hell comes in handy when you're having a gout attack.

There's more going on here than just a father/husband abusing a prescription drug.

What drove him--a full-time schoolteacher--to secretly moonlight as a cab dispatcher? What motivated his quest to clothe his wife beyond their means or drive his young son to the breaking point to shine in football and math? For that matter, what urged his over indulgence in Cortisone in the first place?

Could it be a deep-seated depression in trying to measure up in mid-50s suburbia, to keep up with the Joneses and gain acceptance with the in-crowd through posturing as superior--all the while wrestling in elitist middle class values?

Nicholas Ray's "Bigger Than Life" is a scathing expose of the underbelly of this period and lifestyle. Things certainly weren't as cozy as previously painted, and the insatiable drive toward peer acceptance may be the underlying cause of the hero's problems.

James Mason offers a powerful portrait of a very pathetic suburban victim; Barbara Rush is his dutiful wife, and Christoper Olsen his sympathetic son.

Although horribly miscast James Mason turns in a good performance as a man who overindulges in prescriptive cortisone. A happy well adjusted man turns into a psychotic monster bit by bit frightening everyone around him including his wife and son. The best performance in the film is that of Barbara Rush as Mason's wife and mother of their son Christopher Olsen.

Mason after a few collapses and fainting spells is diagnosed with a rare malady that is causing the collapse of his arteries. Cortisone was an experimental treatment at the time, the most famous person taking it was Senator John F. Kennedy who was being treated secretly for Addison's Disease. All of which we learned after President Kennedy was assassinated. I myself was treated years ago for conjunctivitis with an eye drop in both eyes. Later on a shot to clear up skin problems. I can say that I never had the issues Mason did.

As Mason's doctors Robert F. Simon and Roland Winters cautiously tell their patient cortisone will be a permanent part of your life now and it cannot be abused because we've detected bad side effects in people we've treated. But abuse it he does.

Although James Mason has played American roles before I could not quite accept him as American here. For him it would have been better had the story taken place in an English setting. Part of this role called for him to be an old college jock, a football player and I could not buy that for a New York minute.

Rush gave one of her best performances in a subtle and controlled way as Mason's frightened and concerned wife. Walter Matthau has a supporting role as a concerned neighbor and fellow teacher. Watching Bigger Than Life I could not help feeling if Matthau were in the lead the film would be better.

Still Bigger Than Life is a fine drama about the evils of prescriptive drug abuse.

(Written after my second viewing of this picture: first viewing, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, some years ago; today's viewing at Film Forum, NYC) I went to see this film today with some excitement, but also some trepidation. It had made an impact on first viewing, but, apart from memories jogged by stills seen in the interim, little had stuck with me -- perhaps just a vague recollection of a balls-out James Mason performance. (In that I was not disappointed.) This film has long been a keystone in Nicholas Ray's reputation, being viewed as a bold tale told with the full resources of Technicolor and CinemaScope. Well, it's in Technicolor (actually DeLuxe Color) and Cinemascope. But it's not much of a tale, and it's not told very well. Ray's cinema, it's true, has some impressive moments, often in color and 'scope. Certainly "Johnny Guitar" is a near-masterpiece, "Rebel" is filled with great things (and some very obvious Freudian mumbo-jumbo), "Party Girl" (my favorite Ray)'s unsuppressed violence spills over into its visual world with a fabulous abandon, "King of Kings" is by far the best of the (generally miserable) late 50's/early 60's epics, and, in black and white, "In a Lonely Place" is a complex, beautiful film. But Ray has serious weaknesses as well, and they are abundantly clear in "Bigger Than Life." As a piece of story-telling, first of all, it is clumsy, and, surprisingly, in its first 45 minutes, even stodgy (even though the script is reputed to have been "entirely reworked" by Ray and Gavin Lambert). And very stodgily staged (the scenes with the three doctors are fairly excruciating), like some of Sirk's drearier moments. There is a real lack of feeling for how people actually move and speak. It's true that, once Mason is in high-gear on cortisone, the temperature of the film rises considerably, but the reactions to him are scripted in unbelievable fashion. One finds oneself feeling superior to the characters in a way that can't have been intended: they are acting stupidly when we are supposed to believe they are doing the best they can (or at least normally). Barbara Rush (as Mason's wife) looks very pretty, but has no life of her own. Obviously this female submission is intended as a 'critique of contemporary mores', but the film has not created a world of its own wide enough to sustain such a wide-ranging critique. All in all (I really can't bear to go on) this feels like a "social problem" film gone wildly astray. Ray was clearly (and, let me add, commendably) interested in and committed to worthy (liberal) causes, but neglected his obviously real gifts as a film artist. (Whether he had great gifts as a film storyteller is another matter, perhaps.) But I think to compare him to Otto Preminger, among others, and find Preminger wanting is the height of folly. Sure, Preminger made some bad pictures, but almost all of them are in the post-1966 post-studio period, when NOBODY seemed to be able to make a good picture. Ray had made his last film by then, having made a mess of "55 Days at Peking" (which turned out fairly well anyway, though finished by others) and become unhirable (drug and alcohol abuse being the culprits). It's sad, but it's time to look at the pictures themselves. "Bigger Than Life," "Wind Across the Everglades" (disastrous in almost every respect), "Hot Blood" (weak, though enjoyable) are not great pictures, despite their "Nick Ray" branding. And that thing that Win Wenders made is hard to forgive...

Incidental notes: Gus Schilling, who had played the druggist in "The Magnificent Ambersons" some fifteen years previously, plays a similar role here. And the milkman here is the same actor (Richard Collier) as the milkman in "The Girl Can't Help It" and a dead ringer for the milkman in "Imitation of Life" (David Tomack)!