“Childhood is a congenital disease,’ and “it’s the job of education to fix it,’ suggests a slightly manic James Mason, a grammar school teacher, to appalled parents on parent teacher night. Unfortunately for the parents the formally mild mannered loving family man entrusted to educating their children is on a downward spiral that will culminate in a bible belting homicidal psychosis. But it wasn’ always like this. Early on in Nicholas Ray’ 1956 drama, a year after he directed Rebel Without a Cause, Mason is working two jobs just to keep up the middle class lifestyle they have become accustomed to. Yet the damage to his health is irreversible, and following a series of blackouts he discovers he has an incurable inflammation of the arteries and is given 12 months to live – unless he considers an experimental new treatment with wonder drug cortisone. Bigger Than Life is possibly one of the most scathing attacks on 50′ middle class suburbia ever filmed. It’s impossible not to see links with American Beauty, as it tears at the conservatism, the repression and the façade of 50′ life. Yet like American Beauty there are no solutions, the alternative it offers is even more terrifying as Mason, no longer subservient to the social order of the day becomes increasingly unhinged. It’s undoubtedly a warning about the use and misuse of so called wonder drugs, yet it’s also a warning about the dangers of domesticity, as Mason a former football hero becomes increasingly frustrated by the banality of his life. For Mason it’s one of his most remarkable performances of his career and for Ray, a dark obscure gem that is finally allowed to see the light of day.
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-Bob Baker Fish
