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.