Bigger Than Life (1956)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) Digging into Hollywood’s back catalogue can be weird at times—you can find socially conscious films well before it became acceptable or fashionable to discuss those topics, except that this high-minded intention is often undermined by a sensationalist, less-than credible execution. So it is that Bigger Than Life delves, in 1956, into the topic of painkiller addiction, but then goes on to make its main character an unbalanced murdering psychopath due to a rare interaction between cortisone and his body chemistry. Director Nicholas Ray was doing good work for the time here—even if a modern view on the film will more readily see the melodramatic plotting, overdone drama and naïve treatment of its topic. On the other hand, well, we have Walter Matthau beating up James Mason (even throwing him through stair rails!) to prevent Mason’s character from murdering his wife and child, so that’s something. (Of note for Matthau fans: In Bigger Than Life, his third feature film, he beats up James Mason; in King Creole, his sixth, he gets beaten up by Elvis Presley. I’m sure you didn’t expect that.)  More seriously, though, Ray couldn’t have found a better lead actor than Mason—the English legend’s smooth voice and refined manners allow him to switch from hero to villain on a dime, and that’s what he ends up doing here as the drugs take over. The scene in which he puts down a parent at a PTA meeting is simply delicious, and plays into an overhanging suggestion that the nuclear family was a sham even in the 1950s. Mason is good enough, in fact, that he makes it much easier to ignore the script’s ham-fisted “drugs will make you a psychopath” thrust—if anyone’s going to go crazy, Mason makes it supremely entertaining. The result is… fair, although I suspect that I was interested in Bigger than Life for reasons that didn’t have much to do with Ray’s original intent. But, you know, that’s still a perfectly valid way to enjoy a film.