Bigger Than Life Reviews

James Mason gives a shattering performance in Nicholas Ray's BIGGER THAN LIFE, an extraordinarily rich study of mid-1950s malaise, hidden under the guise of being a medical case history of a man who undergoes a radical personality transformation after taking the experimental "wonder drug" cortisone. Ed Avery (James Mason) is a teacher who, after suffering a series of sharp pains, and then blacking out, is taken to the hospital for a battery of tests. He is diagnosed with a rare case of inflammation of the arteries and is told that most cases are fatal within one year, but that an experimental hormone called cortisone could prolong his life. His condition improves after taking the cortisone, and he returns to work after a week with renewed vigor and energy, proposing revolutionary ideas to the education system. At home, he has periods of manic happiness, alternating with bouts of acute depression, but refuses to see a doctor, and begins to increase his cortisone dosages, eventually forging prescriptions to get more. He accuses Lou of having an affair with his friend, Wally, and tells her that he has outgrown her and is leaving, but decides to stay for the sake of their son, Richie. Ed devotes himself to raising Richie according to a strict "program," and constantly bullies him, whether teaching him how to play football, or helping him with schoolwork. Wally informs Lou about an article in a medical journal that reveals the mental side effects and long-term dangers of cortisone. Lou tells Ed about it and asks him to stop taking the drug, but he refuses. Richie tries to find the cortisone pills and destroy them, but Ed catches him and tells Lou that their son is a thief. He reads her the biblical story of Abraham and proposes they kill Richie and then themselves. When she tries to dissuade him, he locks her in a closet and goes to Richie's room with a pair of scissors, but Wally comes over, and they have a fight. Ed is knocked unconscious and taken to the hospital, and the doctor tells Lou that he may be psychotic when he awakens. After 30-hours of sedation, Ed wakes up, sees his family, and hugs them. The original script for BIGGER THAN LIFE was a fairly straightforward medical case study, which was then expanded on by Mason (who also produced) and Ray, with uncredited help from Gavin Lambert and Clifford Odets, resulting in one of Ray's most penetrating dissections of the American male psyche and the mid-20th-Century nuclear family. Like the X-ray shot of Ed's stomach as he drinks barium, Ray uses his camera to expose the psychological pressures and physical stress of everyday life that lies beneath the surface of a seemingly cheerful suburbia. The worry about money and paying bills, something rarely discussed in films of the 1950s, is immediately established by showing Ed working at a cab company after school, but hiding it from his wife, which exacerbates his physical condition. After he's "cured," the first thing he does is take the family out on an extravagant shopping spree, as if to liberate himself from his economic shackles, screaming "What's the matter with this family" when Lou and Richie tell him they can't afford it. Ed's personality change--the megalomania, grandiose schemes, intellectual snobbery, disgust with petty domesticity, and the manic-depressive mood swings--all of which are attributed to the cortisone's side effects, actually existed already within Ed but were repressed, and are now brought to the surface. His gradual transformation into a zealous ideologue, espousing right-wing doctrine (discipline, self-sacrifice, apocalyptic retribution) reaches its peak at a PTA meeting where he accuses the school of "Breeding a race of moral midgets," with the world on the verge of blowing up. Ray's metaphorical use of wholesome "All-American" symbols and institutions is particularly striking: a glass of milk triggers one of Ed's tantrums; his college football becomes an object of fear and hypocrisy for Richie; the school is turned into an unstable place after Ed expresses his radical philosophy; and a Sunday at church inspires Ed's final breakdown, as he reads from the Bible and gets the idea to "save" Richie and his family by killing them. As always, Ray's use of architecture and space is nothing less than brilliant, with the Avery house becoming a character in the film. The downstairs dining room is bright and clean, while Ed's study and the upstairs bedrooms are places of ominous shadows and dark secrets, filled with broken mirrors and surreptitious behavior. The backyard becomes a psychological battleground as Ed bullies Richie and screams, "Don't you want to become a man?" when he keeps dropping the football, and appropriately, the violent finale takes place on the staircase which connects the two worlds. The superb widescreen compositions, which are essential to any appreciation of the film, and the symbolic use of color (e.g., Richie's unchanging red, white, and blue outfit, which is virtually identical to James Dean's in Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE), combined with a profoundly disturbing existential story, create one of the most intelligent, adult, and disquieting American films of the 1950s. (Adult situations.)