Bigger Than Life (The Criterion Collection)

Product Description A schoolteacher becomes violently addicted to a new wonder drug, cortisone. Directed by Nicholas Ray. Amazon.com Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life is a great American film long esteemed overseas but little known in its own land. That should change with this addition to the Criterion Collection--the film's first-ever U.S. video release, and a paradigm of what Criterion exists to do. James Mason (who also produced the picture) is wonderfully subtle in an unlikely role, a Middle American schoolteacher named Ed Avery who's afflicted with a rare inflammation of the arteries. Only experimental hormone treatment can save the man from increasing pain and early death--but misuse of the drug leads to a darkening and distortion of his gentle personality and a nightmare situation for his family. Bigger Than Life isn't a cautionary lesson in the perils of "miracle drugs," even if its genesis was a New Yorker article about a real-life case of cortisone abuse. Instead, consider the film as an adult, flip-side variant of Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (made the year before): an EKG of the American middle class in the Eisenhower era. The medical issues on the surface pale beside, in Jonathan Lethem's phrase, "the anxieties just under the skin of the film"--the personal, cultural, and socio-economic dilemmas that mostly remain unspoken, and unanswerable. The picture is a landmark in the evolution of CinemaScope. Ray was among the first directors to explore the possibilities the wide screen held for psychological and emotional expressiveness (as opposed to mere pictorialism and spectacle), and he uses it brilliantly even though most of the film transpires within a middle-class home. The house is cunningly designed and visualized to seem commonplace, and probably '50s audiences in America registered it that way--just another glance at their everyday reality--while foreign audiences saw lucid and powerful abstraction. Ray invests every sector with dynamic potentiality and meaning, including the acre of thicket and scrub out back that realistically shouldn't be there a stone's throw from the Averys' picture-perfect suburban street. Add the director's bold use of color to underscore the disquiet and intensify the emotional environment, and we have an exemplary modern film. This comes through all the more strongly on the DVD and especially in Blu-ray; the home screen enhances both the abstraction and the specificity of Ray's vision. In the meticulous digital restoration of the original camera negative, the colors are more crisply and definitively there than in any shopworn repertory print or standard TV broadcast. --Richard T. Jameson Additional Features The disc extras go a long way toward illuminating not only Bigger Than Life but also the art, career, and complex personality of its director. The film isn't mentioned in the 1977 Profile of Nicholas Ray, a TV interview of the director conducted by journalist Cliff Jahr; Rebel Without a Cause, Ray's "prophetic treatment of troubled youth culture," gets the lion's share of attention. However, the half-hour includes key biographical information, and one magical moment finds Ray recalling and reenacting a James Dean improv that led the director to devise a brilliant camera movement in Rebel. Running commentary is supplied by British film critic Geoff Andrews; the author of The Films of Nicholas Ray knows his subject, but he tends to drone in fuddy-duddy fashion. A video interview offering reminiscences by Ray's widow Susan adds little to our understanding, but Suburban Subversion, a half-hour video essay on Bigger Than Life by novelist Jonathan Lethem, is a gem. Lethem places the film in terms of its era ("What's remarkable is what it excludes of American culture") and conducts a probing examination of its visual and dramatic design ("So much attention to detail, and it never calls attention to itself"). There's an intriguing consideration of the sexuality of one of Ed Avery's