"Bigger Than Life" was every bit as urgent, ripped-from-the-headlines melodramatic and stocked with frenzied, memorable incidents as "Rebel Without A Cause" but Mr.and Mrs. Buttered Popcorn turned away from it......it had to wait a full generation before critics and film buffs rediscovered it. And what a film they found......Ray used "Bigger Than Life", technically a true life chronicle of the dangerous after effects of prescription drugs, to deconstruct and destroy the 1950's American family. Almost bordering on horror during its final moments, it's 'Jeckyll and Hyde dropped down into picket fence suburbia.....
James Mason plays a gentle hearted middle school teacher beloved by his wife and young son. (Barbara Rush, Christopher Olsen) Unbeknownst to his family, he's struggling to make ends meet by moonlighting as a yellow cab dispatcher, but suffering at both jobs when suddenly afflicted with bouts of physical agony.....
After collapsing, his doctors hand him a death sentence with an escape clause......the rare inflammation of his arteries will kill him, but the new 'wonder drug' hormone Cortisone might save him. To no one's surprise, Mason opts for the Cortisone even with his doctors' dire warnings about the drug's tendency to cause wild mood swings.
Apparently enjoying the 'up' part of the mood swings a little too much, Mason starts poppin' the Cortisone like Tic-Tacs. (The scene where he easily tricks a druggist into selling him more pills reminds us of airport scenes in 50's movies.....where everybody easily breezes in and out of terminals, unfettered and unbothered...)
Since he's an over-achieving intellectual and former college football star, the drug amplifies Mason into a sort of bullying, blustering Neo-Nazi with a God complex. The unnerving sequences where he terrifies and torments his innocent family are among Ray's best work as a director and Mason's as an actor. You almost can't bear to look. (Although we found it a little hard to swallow the erudite, patrician Mason as a rip roarin' former football hero......but as a drug-addled psycho, he's superb....)
Before the really disturbing stuff starts, Ray has a bit of perverse fun in a scene where Mason outrages and scandalizes Parent-Teacher night. Mason, clearly flying up in his Cortisone stratosphere, outrages his students' parents, calling the kids morons and apes, mercilessly mocking modern education's emphasis on student creativity and independent thought at the expense of hardcore learning. One of the dads in attendance, probably a future Trump supporter, gives Mason's rants a ringing endorsement . ("He should be the Principal!")
The film's dark climax provides Ray all he needs to fully tear apart what's left of this once typical family structure. Mason, inspired by the bible's tale of Abraham and his son Issac, decides to rewrite the Old Testament and correct God's version by actually killing his own little boy. (which makes Christopher Olsen, who also played the kidnapped child in Hitchcock's "Man Who Knew Too Much", the most abused kid of l956)
Brief at 95 minutes and brutal in its dramatic impact, 1950's audiences ignored the film. Way ahead of its time on multiple issues, you can see all its harbingers on display.......the economic struggles of America's post war middle class, the dawn of drug abuse, and in the madness of Mason's drug-fueled egomania.....a harrowing glimpse of families undone by domestic abuse. BQ declares it as a 'not to be missed' and we prescribe 4 stars (****)......you might find yourself listening more carefully to that litany of side-effects in the drug ads......
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