Bigger Than Life

Another entry in my "100 films" series, here is Nicholas Ray's little seen but much admired drug addiction melodrama, Bigger Than Life.

Bigger Than Life

Directed by Nicholas Ray

Written by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum

Starring James Mason, Barbara Rush and Walter Matthau

“But Ed, God saved Isaac!”

“God was wrong!”

-James Mason and Barbara Rush

When James Mason speaks those words at the climax of Nicholas Ray’s Cortisone addiction melodrama Bigger Than Life, I cannot tell if the audience is laughing with him, or at him. I know that I am laughing with him, for his words are literally what the title promises. But many people like to scoff at melodrama as though it’s beneath them. It is the tragedy of the American audience: we have out-sophisticated ourselves to the point where we don’t want to accept Dorothy Malone dancing Robert Keith to death in Written on the Wind, but we will accept cars that turn into robots.

Melodrama, the most operatic of genres, brought out the best in some of our greatest directors. Vincente Minnelli’s melodramas stand as masterpieces of the 1950s, as do Douglas Sirk’s. Bigger Than Life deserves to stand with them as an example of my favorite subgenre: discontented suburban American life. The plot is ridiculous by today’s standards, and yet there is something so oddly compelling about it. I tried describing it to my writing partner over the phone one night, and he thought I was talking about a movie like The Room. But no. Yes, it has moments of hilarity, often at its most dramatic points. But it is not to be laughed at and derided. It is to be taken very, very seriously.

One of the reasons the melodrama genre stays with me as much as any is because of its basis in German Expressionism, with high-key lighting, angular sets and its forays into opera. The Europeans understood that during times of social upheaval, it was best to create plays where the characters stood as symbols for the world they lived in, and to put them in intensely dramatic situations. Bigger Than Life does just that. Released at the height of 1950s cold war mania, and right when drug addiction was beginning to enter the fray as a social conversation, it is the antithesis of what we want to believe the 1950s were like. Behind every white picket fence lies a family…but not always a happy one.

Of all the films in this book, the only one I urge you not to watch with me is Bigger Than Life. Even worse, I urge you not to watch it with my father and I in the same room, for one reason: both of us do James Mason impersonations the way most ordinary fathers and sons play catch in the backyard. Only recently did I start to challenge my father in doing the James Mason voice, and now when we watch films of his together, we find ourselves saying the dialogue in unison. While watching this film in class, I tortured my friends my doing my James Mason all day. In fact, I want to raise money for student theatre at Northwestern by making a bet with someone to see if I can talk like James Mason for an entire day. Diatribe on talking like James Mason aside, I would like to delve into the brilliance of this weirdly compelling film.

Made on the heels of The Man With the Golden Arm, and with a bigger budget, Bigger Than Life is the second Hollywood movie to seriously deal with drug addiction. Although Frank Sinatra’s Frankie Machine was trying to find redemption but kept getting sidetracked by his need for heroin, James Mason’s Ed Avery is a humble schoolteacher who does not begin the film a drug addict, but rather, as a typical father of the nuclear family. In the film’s first shot after the credits, a dramatic chord plays as we see Mason’s wrist clutching his school desk in pain. This is melodrama at its finest; going back to the old days when radio plays would warn us of ominous events by the musical notes played. Ed Avery appears to be perfect on the surface, but he’s really being emasculated as the film opens. He’s physically weak, has to work a second job at a cab company in order to keep his family afloat, and even his son doesn’t always know if he’s the hero he claims to be. Soon, his heart problems become more and more palpable, and it is discovered that he has severe inflammation of the arteries. Due to this, the doctors have to put him on a new, experimental drug—CORTISONE! DA DA DUM!

This is where I think the film can lose modern day viewers. “Cortisone?” my good friend Rachel said after we finished watching it together. “That’s what I put on my rash!” She is right. Cortisone is, in our culture, a fairly innocent drug. But back in the 1950s, we didn’t know its power. Cortisone was still a scary drug, and taken in large doses, it could possibly provoke violent behavior. But it does cure Ed’s arteries, and he soon finds himself happier and livelier than he’s ever been. Little do we know of the psychosis that’s to come.

Mason’s performance in Bigger Than Life is brilliantly mannered, allowing the negligible details that we might not think about while watching the film to come across in analysis later. One of the great scenes in the film comes when he’s been released from the hospital and takes his family shopping. He’s gleeful and incredibly happy to be alive—Cortisone has given him a new lease on life. But in his happiness lies an unnatural quality that we know is going to be made manifest through the course of the film. He is almost too happy, not like a normal person. In one of the film’s finest shots, he stares in the mirror and imagines himself a cad with a cigarette in his mouth. The Cortisone does not just affect his outer life, but it affects his inner life as well, and his perception on reality slowly becomes more and more bent out of shape. Credit must also be given to James Mason for acting as a producer on the film and helping get it made in a time when stars were being given more and more leverage as to what projects they wanted to choose. No question this was a risky venture for him and for 20^th Century Fox.

Though Ray is not as associated with melodrama as say, Douglas Sirk, he understood the same techniques that the German-born Sirk and the expatriate Fritz Lang did, and as a result, Bigger Than Life has a distinctly German feel to it. Although it begins with a beautiful, Eastman-color view of an average American town, the colors soon become darker shades of red and blue, and blacks and whites start to find their way into the image system too. Shadows, the ultimate symbol of terror in expressionist cinema, plays a role in the great moment where Mason, by now insane, is forcing his son to do a math problem nonstop until he gets it right. The lamp behind him casts his harsh, angular shadow onto the wall, overpowering the young boy.

The boy, played by Christopher Olsen, finds his relationship with his father going slowly off a cliff around this point. In one tense moment, he takes the phone into the bathroom and declares his intent to call the Doctor. “I’d rather you were dead then still on that awful drug!” he cries. But Mason snips the wire, and is allowed to indulge in his vice for a while longer. Of course, the boy brings about one of my favorite lines in all of cinema, when Mason walks down the stairs, completely insane, reading the Bible story of Abraham taking Isaac to be slaughtered. I don’t need to repeat the quote here, but it does not end well for Mason, who locks his wife in the closet and runs upstairs with a knife to literally murder his son!

And at that moment, Ray’s foothold on expressionism and melodrama comes into full focus. While creepy carousel music plays in the background, Mason suddenly raises the knife and realizes he cannot go through with it. As the music blares, Walter Matthau as the friendly neighbor runs in and has an all out fight with Mason, eventually subduing him. The whole scene has an off-kilter feel. It borders on ridiculous, but think of the way the audience must have reacted in 1955 to the moment when Matthau pushes Mason through the stair railing, leaving a pile of ash and wood on the floor. Think of how shocking it must have been when Mason, knife prepared, suddenly sees a giant spiral of red as the carnival music unsettles the whole frame. One thinks immediately back to the climax of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and Guy and Bruno’s struggle on the spinning merry-go-round.

Although it could be argued that Bigger Than Life ends on a deus ex machina, I don’t totally subscribe to that theory. The doctors warn Mason’s wife that he may not even recognize her when he wakes up, and that he may well die from his arterial condition. But when he does wake up, and embrace his family in the film’s final image, once again, my colleagues and I all laughed at the abrupt resolution of this searing drama. We are meant to assume, if we think the ending is happy, that Mason will take reduced dosages of Cortisone and all will be well. But will it? No matter what, he’s still on the Cortisone! To me, the movie ends almost too neatly. Certainly a director like Nicholas Ray would be aware that ending something on too happy a note does not mean the future is bright for these characters. Despite the normalcy that might be restored to them, the Averys are not a family to be envied.

Out of circulation for years, Bigger Than Life finally got a long-needed and well-deserved Criterion restoration this past year, assuring its presence in cinema classes and history for years to come. Jean Luc Godard even included it on his favorite American films of all time list for Cahiers du Cinema. And yet when I described this film to my best friend over the phone, he thought I might as well have been describing The Room, given all the laughs the movie gets. But he’s wrong. Bigger Than Life is not a “great bad” movie, it is a great movie. The trailer says that the film is “so shocking, you’ll wonder how it was ever made!” In this day and age, when we don’t take melodramas seriously the way we used to, I wonder how it ever got made too.

The Merry Go Round Starts Up Again

In the spring of 2005, I wrote in response to Warners changing the Looney Tunes characters to be crime fighting superheroes in the not-too-distant future: "Why change what Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng did so perfectly? Also, I don't understand why they want the younger generation to appreciate the characters in this format. They got the previous generations to watch Wile E. Coyote chase the Road Runner endlessly and Bugs Bunny outwit Elmer Fudd on Saturday morning."

So I go back to the same question? Why is Warners changing the Looney Tunes yet again?

In this Thursday's New York Times, Brookes Barnes wrote about Warners newest effort to bring their most famous characters back into the limelight. Now, the new Looney Tunes Show will feature Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck living in a city apartment, with the other characters like Porky Pig, Sylvester and Marvin the Martian as their neighbors. This in and of itself is not such a bad idea. Barnes' article is well-written and the people involved seem like they know what they're doing. But I question the point.

There is no question that during the last few decades, Warners has struggled with trying to make the Looney Tunes "modern." I put "modern" in quotation marks because they have always been so afraid that just because something they do is old, it's therefore "irrelevant" and must be "updated." So throughout the year we're going to get new Road Runner cartoons in theatres, but they'll be in 3-D. Maybe this will fare more successfully than their previous efforts, but one can't be too sure.

Space Jam was a box office bomb, although it remains a cult classic among members of my generation. Tiny Toon Adventures, although criticized by members of the animation industry for being plagiarism, was a success. The misfire that sent the dominos falling though, was Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the 2003 dud directed by Joe Dante. This film should have worked perfectly on paper. Dante understands what makes the old cartoons great, and he even went so far to be faithful as to use Treg Brown's original sound effects. But he had a bad script, and a paychecking Steve Martin, and made one of the biggest flops in Warners' history.

So in 2005, when Warners decided to turn 180 degrees and create Loonatics, people were outraged. I know I was one of them. The sheer idea of it was enough to make me throw up in my mouth. Who wants to see Bugs Bunny be a crime fighting superhero? That's not his character. Bugs Bunny has to do crazy things and break the fourth wall. There is a whole rich history of Warners cartoons that the bigwigs seemed to reject just to make a couple of bucks. According to Barnes though, the people in charge of the new series have framed artwork of Loonatics above their desks, as a reminder of what not to do.

Now this is all very well and good, and maybe the new Looney Tunes Show will be a success. It's certainly a funny idea to have them all live together, and if the makers of the cartoon have studied the old shorts, then maybe they'll have a hit. But I have to ask them all this: why haven't they done the simplest thing, and start re-broadcasting the old cartoons on TV?

When I was six, seven and eight, Cartoon Network wasn't what it was today. Their original programming was relegated to the "What a Cartoon" show, and it wasn't until 1997 and 1998 that Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo and Dexter's Laboratory became their benchmark animated series. Before this happened, Cartoon Network used to be the go-to place for watching old Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and most importantly, Looney Tunes. I was addicted to the Tex Avery Show, which aired every Saturday and Sunday mornings, and would watch all his old MGM and Warners stuff. But what's more, Cartoon Network was where the new generation of seven and eight year olds could watch Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. We grew up watching the deranged sensibilities of Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, and guess what--it worked.

You can watch a Looney Tunes cartoon today and still be incredibly entertained by it, in spite of the fact that we are going on sixty years since Duck Amuck first came out in theatres. It's even more frightening to me to think that my father is the exact same age as What's Opera Doc? and One Froggy Evening. When they started coming out on DVD in 2003, I got the first volume for Christmas and devoured it, along with all the extras. My friend Charley, who was four years younger than I, once came over for a sleepover, and we found ourselves rolling on the floor, cracking up at Bugs Bunny fighting Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, and all the other characters. In my last blog, I talked about Duck Amuck being the perfect movie--which I still believe. So doesn't Warners understand that if it isn't broke they shouldn't fix it?

If this show is going to go over with fans of the old cartoons, I want to see crazy fourth wall jokes. I want Bugs Bunny to hold up signs with pictures of a screw and a ball on them. Know what the best Looney Tunes cartoon has been in the last ten years? The final five minutes of South Park's season five episode, Osama Bin Laden Wears Farty Pants, where Cartmen turns into Bugs Bunny and goes crazy attacking the leader of the Taliban. If the Looney Tunes are dropped into an average, sit-commy world, then in another five years we'll get another new series, trying desperately to get us to pay attention to these characters. Memo to Warners: the new generations of kids will love Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck again when you realize that you don't need to change anything. Looney Tunes will always make people laugh, regardless of age, race or nationality. And until you realize that, you'll still be licking your wounds.

Attached as a bonus is "A New Bunny," a short which is demented and totally wrong on every level--but it still makes me laugh, so there you go.

Duck Amuck

Here we have my second entry for my 100 Movies You Should See...book. For those of you who read the last entry and think after this one it's going to be nothing but weird choices like this, I can assure you that I'll get to Citizen Kane and Casablanca in due time. For now, appreciate the entries about movies you may not be accustomed to reading critical essays on.

Duck Amuck

Directed by Chuck Jones

Written by Michael Maltese

Starring Daffy Duck

“Buster, it may come as a complete surprise to you to find that this is an animated cartoon, and that in animated cartoons, they have scenery, and in all the years I’ve…

(As he vents, he is erased from the feet up.)

“Alright, wise guy, where am I?”

-Daffy Duck

Debates go on all the time about what the most “perfect movie ever made” could be. Is it something like Citizen Kane? The Godfather? Musical fans will go for Singin in the Rain, action fans for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Foreign film lovers may suggest 400 Blows or Seven Samurai. I don’t believe a work of art should be perfect: as Ray Bradbury says, if you keep trying to perfect something, you perfect it out of existence. If a movie has a flaw, it reminds me that there is somebody human working on it; the camera going blurry during Frank Sinatra’s red queen speech in The Manchurian Candidate, for example.

But if a work of art is to be perfect, it is perfect in large part because it is short and to the point, without an ounce of fat. You can have perfect sequences in films, even if the films that surround them have flaws. Apocalypse Now is a flawed movie, but the Ride of the Vaklyries sequence is as perfect as moviemaking can be.

My nominee for the most perfect movie ever made? Chuck Jones’s 1953 masterpiece, Duck Amuck. Would I defend this in an academic setting? Probably not. But we’re not in an academic environment, so now I have to defend this!

Duck Amuck is the best cartoon Warner Brothers ever made during their golden age of animation. Most animation historians and fans have it in their top five, along with What’s Opera Doc? and also One Froggy Evening. Unlike those cartoons, however, Duck Amuck’s genius comes from the fact that for the first time, a cartoon is making us aware of the fact that we are watching a cartoon. And it does it with the best character possible: Daffy Duck.

Daffy Duck first appeared in the WB canon during the 1930s, when Tex Avery was using him as just an insane duck who would come on screen and say some crazy things. As he evolved over time, he became more of an antagonist, a character whose frustrations we enjoy because we know that nine times out of ten, we will never experience his pains. But when he’s not being beaten with everything but the kitchen sink, we can feel his frustration. None of us have ever had anvils dropped on our heads, but there have been moments where we go on stage and bomb with the audience, as Daffy does in several cartoons with his arch-rival, Bugs Bunny. As Chuck Jones said in an interview once, “I wake up thinking I’m Bugs Bunny, but when I look in the mirror I see Daffy Duck.”

There are few greater joys in Warner Brothers cartoons than watching Daffy get really, really pissed off about something. Duck Amuck is seven minutes of nothing but Daffy getting really, really pissed off. As a result, it always makes me laugh, no matter how many times I see it. When it begins, we think we’re watching a conventional cartoon. Daffy leaps on screen as a musketeer, but suddenly the background ends and he finds himself against nothing but white. “Pssst! Whoever’s in charge here—the scenery! Where’s the scenery?” he asks in the most polite moment of the cartoon. From there the background changes to a farm, angering Daffy, who has to go into a farm costume—until he walks through the scene and finds himself in the Arctic. From the Arctic he goes to Hawaii, until finally he’s back in front of a white background.

Now having played with backgrounds, we see what happens when Daffy Duck gets all his sounds mixed up. Treg Brown, the brilliant Looney Tunes sound designer, is at his best here finding the most awkward noises imaginable for Daffy. Now a singing cowboy, he strums his guitar, only to find no sound coming out. In a trademark Looney Tunes moment, he holds up a sign saying “Sound please!” and gets a machine gun rattle as soon as he strums. In frustration, he breaks the guitar, only for it to haw like a donkey. When he opens his mouth to scream, but crows like a rooster. When the sound does finally come back, Daffy flies around the frame screaming gibberish.

One of the most brilliant things about Duck Amuck is that it plays with the concept of Daffy’s existence as a character in this animated world. Since Daffy doesn’t exist in real life, who says he even has to be a duck to begin with? Daffy’s transformation by the unseen animator into a weird four-legged, multi-colored, flower-faced creature with a flag saying he’s a screwball on his tail is one of the most beloved moments in any Warner cartoon for precisely this reason. We get to see Daffy take on a myriad of roles in this cartoon, changing his costume constantly, but even with a different suit or body, he’ll always be Daffy Duck—this insane personality who hates what the world gives him.

Just when you think Duck Amuck is running out of ideas, it pulls a fast one as we watch the edges of the frame collapse around Daffy. Even though he’s been beaten constantly, he refuses to lose the war as he keeps trying to prevent the picture from collapsing in on itself. The only other moment in animation which reaches the heights of this absurdity is at the end of Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler, where the mute thief runs into the frame, yanks on the edges and finds that he’s actually stolen the film strip, before he wanders off silently.

By the film’s end, Daffy has been thoroughly beaten, and when he demands that the unseen animator finally reveal himself, we finally see the famous gloved hand of Bugs Bunny draw a door and shut it, locking out Daffy. It’s revealed finally that Bugs has been tormenting Daffy this whole time, sitting at an animator’s desk. “Ain’t I a stinker?” he smiles as the camera finally irises out. So Duck Amuck is a joke upon a joke upon a joke: an animated cartoon about the mutability and absurdity of animated cartoons drawn by an animated cartoon character as though he actually existed in the real world—an animated cartoon character drawing an animated cartoon character and making his unrealistic life a living hell. There’s a lot to take in there. I’m surprised that Camus and Sartre didn’t write essays about the utter existential nature of this short film.

No Warner cartoon ever played with the properties of animation so hysterically well. Rabbit Rampage, a follow-up, featured Elmer Fudd tormenting Bugs Bunny in the frame, but we don’t enjoy watching Bugs get frustrated because we always want him to win. The people who don't enjoy watching Daffy get frustrated are not people I want in my foxhole.

So is Duck Amuck the most perfect movie ever made? It's hysterical, it borders on existential at times, doesn't have a single wasted image or moment, and does its job in only seven minutes time. I don't know if its perfection qualifies it as a "masterpiece," because it's too small to be that. But how often do you see something that's perfect? For those of you who haven’t yet seen it, here is the link to watch the short in its entirety on Youtube. Perfection awaits.