“Bigger Than Life” (1956)
It was never unusual for Ray to center his melodramas around protagonists riddled with confusion, doubt, anxiety and pain, and the confluence of these ugly, deep-seated psychological issues rages like a hydra-headed confluence of anguish in “Bigger Than Life,” a picture some argue is his incontestable masterpiece. Based on a 1955 The New Yorker article by medical writer Berton Roueché entitled “Ten Feet Tall,” in Ray’s bold and expressionistic telling of this story, the great James Mason plays a family man and small-town school teacher driven to madness by the misuse of a new wonder-drug. Suffering from blackouts and severe pain, the teacher is diagnosed with a rare artery inflammation that may kill him. Doctors tell Mason, his friends and family (his wife is played by Barbara Rush, a colleague played by Walter Matthau) that the only thing that may save him is the experimental use of Cortisone. Initially, responding well to the treatment, Mason’s gentle and caring father-husband-teacher character eventually transforms into a despotic monster at home and near psychopath in every other avenue of his life when he begins to abuse the drug and his addiction flares like a suffering heartburn of the soul. Lurching and careening with color, shadows and lively, wild melodrama, both Mason and Ray play the film — as its title already suggests — larger than life. Shot in glorious CinemaScope, nothing about “Bigger Than Life” is subtle, but the over-the-top mien of the picture is belied by its genuinely uncomfortable suffering and emotional truth. A exposé of addiction and a fairly damning excoriation of suburban life and the underbelly of the quaint Eisenhower era of ’50s picket-fence purity, “Bigger Than Life” was a flop at the time, and its critique of family life was off-putting for those who did see it. But rescued from obscurity by the Criterion Collection (only in 2010, which feels like a decade late, but we’ll take what we can get), it’s hopefully the first phase of a full-scale re-appreciation of the daring filmmaker’s oeuvre.
— with Jessica Kiang, Oliver Lyttelton