Reviews


Bigger Than Life (Criterion Collection)

Colorama: Bigger Than Life - Ahead of Its Time

'To ask a paying audience to sit for almost an hour and watch somebody... go through a painfully slow routine of becoming intoxicated from taking too much cortisone is adding a tax of tedium to the price of admission.' Bosley Crowther's verdict on Bigger Than Life, Nicholas Ray's 1956 drug horror film just about sums it up for critics of the time, who unanimously turned up their noses and fled. But then it's hard to watch Bigger Than Life and not wonder if the film was perversely engineered to lose money. James Mason stars as the hardworking teacher Ed Avery, who struggles to makes ends meet while providing for his loving wife Lou (Barbara Rush) and his son Richie (Christopher Olsen). Ed's world is overturned by the news that he will soon die from a rare condition unless he starts taking a new 'miracle drug' called cortisone. But Ed quickly becomes addicted to the manic rush he gets from taking the stuff and pretty soon he's upping the dose to ensure that he never comes off the high. Thanks to the drug, Ed's mania swings into full-blown psychosis and he transforms from a devoted family man into an arrogant, paranoid bully. His insanity proves to be stronger than love and his family finds it impossible to keep up with the man's crazed demands. Lou and Richie are terrified of this stranger in their house but feel powerless to do anything. Their ordinary suburban existence becomes an absolute nightmare, one that ultimately threatens their very lives. From the distance of over fifty years, Bigger Than Life feels like the perfect predecessor to an entire subgenre of paternal horror stories, in which loving fathers turn into monsters. The Shining, The Stepfather, even the hit TV series Breaking Bad, all owe something to Bigger Than Life. But at the time, the movie was really too dark and too weird to succeed. Even now, long after we've gotten over the sheer blasphemy of watching an ordinary father's love disintegrate into murderous rage, the movie still has the power to disturb. For me, the single most chilling aspect of Bigger Than Life is its refusal to point a finger at the cause of Ed's dark insanity. The literal cause is the cortisone, of course, but the movie can't be summed up as simple PSA. In one of the movie's creepiest scenes, Ed takes over a PTA meeting with a rant on the failure of the school system. 'All this hogwash about ''self-expression,' 'permissiveness'...my friends, I tell you, we're committing hara-kiri every day right here in the classroom!' In this moment, Ed seems almost like a fascist dictator or even a modern political pundit. And the kicker is that many of the parents are utterly mesmerized by his harsh words, agreeing with them because they're harsh and senseless. In other scenes, Mason is the strict, abusive parent, berating his little son to the point of tears and you start to think the movie is an indictment of the American family, along the lines of Rebel Without a Cause. But Nicholas Ray never settles on a single theme; he just pounds you with horror after horror until, like little Richie, you're left huddling on the floor in confusion and fear.
At first glance, James Mason seems absurdly miscast as a beleaguered American school teacher. When he starts rhapsodizing over his glory days as a high school football star, you can only hold the image of Mason scoring the winning touchdown for about five seconds before your brain short-circuits. And yet, in Ray's lurid world, it works. Mason seems so utterly unsuited for this prosaic life, so uncomfortable and sweaty when he tries to make small-talk, that his eventual descent into king-size mania actually feels quite logical. When Mason starts ranting like a demagogue ('We're breeding a race of moral midgets!') or sneering at his wife ('It's a shame I didn't marry someone who was my intellectual equal') it has the ring of truth. These black, icy feelings were part of him from the very beginning. This man was never meant to be 'Father Knows Best.' There is an argument to be made here that, as in the case of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, some of the horror is diminished when the lead actor was so clearly born to play madmen. Wouldn't it have been even creepier to watch someone like Fred MacMurray go nuts? But I think the climax of Bigger Than Life demands a James Mason. When Ed Avery reads from the chapter of Abraham and Isaac, he resolves to sacrifice his son as Abraham did. 'But Ed, you didn't read it all. God stopped Abraham,' his wife says. 'God was wrong!' snaps Mason, with unshakable, impossible conviction. He delivers the line as if he were God. It's utterly terrifying. While Bigger Than Life is unquestionably Mason's show, Barbara Rush faces an even greater acting challenge in portraying his wife, Lou. At every turn, Lou's decisions are incomprehensible. Rather than calling up the doctor at the first signs of Ed's psychosis or trying to monitor Ed's dosage, she waits and watches, trying to pacify Ed even as he starts verbally abusing her and her son. When Ed completely gives into his madness and resolves to kill his son, Lou's response is just as disturbing as the threat itself; she reasons with him softly, trying desperately to control her sobs and kisses him fiercely on the mouth, as if to distract him. It's tempting to pass this off as a typical '50s stereotype of feminine helplessness, but even family friend Walter Matthau finds it bizarre. 'I certainly had you figured wrong, Lou, smart girl like you...why don't you carry the ball for a while?' In an odd way, Lou's passivity feels as pathological as her husband's delusions of grandeur. Director Nicholas Ray had a history of centering his films on misunderstood outlaws and misfits caught in the relentless machinery of an uncaring society (Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, They Live By Night) and at first glance, Bigger Than Life seems headed in the same direction. Our protagonist Ed is openly bored with his suburban life, constrained by its invisible borders. 'We're dull,' Ed tells his wife Lou after a party. 'Can you tell me one thing that was said here tonight that was funny, startling, imaginative?' Ed has all the accouterments of normal American life: a beautiful wife, an adorable son, a safe, comfortable home, and a respectable (if underpaid) job, but it can't satisfy him. So when his cortisone pills send him spiraling into euphoric madness, you might expect it to trigger a sense of rebellion and mischief. Instead, the cortisone turns Ed into a monstrously controlling figure; he becomes the family dictator, punishing his loved ones for the smallest offense. This includes forcing his young son to catch football passes until he collapses, denying him food or water until he finishes his homework correctly, and treating his wife as a hired servant. In the end, Bigger Than Life has more in common with Ray's In a Lonely Place. In both films, the protagonist is put under pressure and reveals a black, boiling rage that defuses explanation or healing. Instead of living life as a free spirit, the outlaw just ends up building his own prison. Bigger Than Life might be the first film in American cinema to treat patriarchy as its own pathology. Ed's madness is essentially him taking the standard masculine prerogatives of the '50s to the ultimate extreme. When the cortisone sends Ed into a euphoric state, he bundles his wife off to the most expensive clothing store in town, loudly demanding service. The extravagant gesture turns into a grueling ordeal for Lou as Ed forces her to try on every dress in the shop, gloating over his wife's attractive figure and shutting down her attempts to stop him. (You really have to wonder if Alfred Hitchcock was in the theater for Bigger Than Life and taking notes for Vertigo.) In Nicholas Ray's hands, even the familiar scene of a dad helping his son with his math homework becomes a German Expressionist nightmare. Mason's shadow looms outrageously over his tiny son, while he relentlessly urges him on. When Lou tries to countermand his orders by sneaking the boy a glass of milk, Mason slowly measures out the missing milk and turns on her with the force of a cobra strike. 'I will not tolerate your attempts to undermine my program for Richard...if you imagine I'm going to be fooled by all this sweetness and meekness, yes, darling and no, darling, you're an even bigger idiot than I took you for!' Ray's use of color and lighting turn the middle-class Avery home into a claustrophobic nightmare, as Ed's family cower away from his hulking figure and vicious words. Bigger Than Life is bizarre, confusing, and frightening. But it is never, ever dull. Bosley Crowther's insistence on being bored by the sight of James Mason demanding the death of his own son seems, in retrospect, like the craziest thing of all. Aubyn Eli blogs about color movies-and a whole of black-and-white ones-at The Girl with the White Parasol.