Focus Features

After making a name for himself and his star James Dean in the teen-trauma drama Rebel Without a Cause, director Nicolas Ray returned to the suburbia that made him famous in his next film, Bigger than Life. Based on a New Yorker article by Berton Roueché called “Ten Feet Tall,” the film, written by studio scribes Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, attempted to dramatize the side-effects of a supposedly new miracle drug called cortisone. James Mason, who’d worked on the script with Ray, decided not only to star in, but also to produce the film. Mason plays Ed Avery, a stand-up father and husband who increasingly becomes dependent on cortisone to deal with life, and as a result shifts from a mild-mannered citizen to an imperious and domineering patriarch lording over his wife, Lou (Barbara Rush), and their young son, Richie (Christopher Olsen). From the first, Ray sensed the story itself was bigger than life, even if he couldn’t always communicate it. Ray’s fourth wife, Susan told him, ““This is your story before you lived it.” Mason remembered, “Nick wanted re-writing to be done but he couldn’t say exactly what it was…He is a person who can’t express himself in words very well.” But he understood the story through his radical use of CinemaScope (turning the wide frame into a claustrophobic domestic prison) and expressionistic bursts of color. Unfortunately, few saw it the way he did, as it was savaged by critics and bombed at the box office. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther complained, “To ask a paying audience to sit for almost an hour and watch somebody go through a painfully slow routine of becoming intoxicated from taking too much cortisone is adding a tax of tedium to the price of admission.” Over a half-century later, the tide has turned. The current Times critic A. O. Scott echoed the modern critical appraisal when he wrote, “The story is secondary to the pageant of emotions and images. This tale of pharmocological woe is really a horror movie, galvanizing in its impact and almost theological in the depth of its implications.”