Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
A masterpiece from one of Classical Hollywood's finest dramatists.
Melodrama gives way to domestic horror in Nicholas Ray’s phenomenal Bigger Than Life, a movie of feverish, boldly menacing visual style. Like Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, the film points ahead to David Lynch’s surrealist suburban nightmares, exploring the latent violence and psychological tumult beneath the cheery facade of middle-class American family life. It’s also quite literally one of the darkest melodramas I’ve seen, with the suburban home cast as a chamber of deep, angular shadows, captured in majestic CinemaScope.
James Mason goes from sedate to diabolical in the role of Ed Avery, a schoolteacher diagnosed with a fatal arterial disease. His prognosis improves when he begins an experimental drug regimen, but as a side effect, Ed’s mood is destabilized. The prescription pills force a crack in his inhibitions, and eventually, to the terror of his wife Lou (Barbara Rush) and their young son, Ed becomes a tyrannical megalomaniac under his medication.
More than a story of medical treatment gone wrong, the film reveals its teeth through its critique of repression, financial insecurity, and unfulfilled desire. Underpaid as a schoolteacher, Ed moonlights with a taxi company to make ends meet. Even with the two jobs, a family vacation is a pipe-dream, something Ed is constantly reminded of by the travel posters hung throughout his home. Physical insecurity manifests in Ed as paranoia towards his friend Wally, who Ed suspects of being romantically interested in Lou. In displays of envy, Ed sarcastically comments on Wally’s lean, athletic physique. When Ed initially returns from the hospital, elated by the new lease on life that his medicine has given him, he takes his wife shopping, splurging on clothes that he would, under his normal mental state, know he cannot afford.
The picture that emerges through these scenes, so finely directed by Ray, is of a man’s no-holds-barred attempt to live up to the image of a powerful, wealthy American patriarch. The things that unmedicated Ed can’t or won’t do - like shower his wife and son with material luxuries, or mold his son into a studious, obedient football player, or even tolerate the clanking of the milkman’s glass cartons - drugged-up Ed will see to with intimidating, unforgiving force. If the film retains a sense of tragedy even as Ed nearly commits the unthinkable, it’s because of how potently Ray outlines the external pressures bearing down on Ed.
The climax is an operatic tour de force, with Ed reaching the heights of his psychosis and, in one indelible line, effectively declaring his authority above that of God himself. The escalating dramatic intensity up to that point is gripping, but equally remarkable is the vividness of countless formal touches scattered all through the film, from the luminous purple of Ed’s pill bottle, to the bright yellow shine of the taxi cabs at his second job, or a frame of Ed considering his reflection in a shattered mirror, his psyche crumbling.