029 - Bigger Than Life, 1956, United States. Dir. Nicholas Ray.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

029 - Bigger Than Life, 1956, United States. Dir. Nicholas Ray.

Filmed in CINEMASCOPE!

Aspect ratio 2:55:1.  That means really WIDE.  Almost twice as wide as the standard Academy Ratio.

In glorious Color by De Luxe.

These are the specs for BIG PICTURES.

Epics!

The Bridge on the River Kwai.  A Farewell to Arms.  The Robe.  The Egyptian.  The Virgin Queen.  The Gladiators.  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Westerns!

River of No Return.  Ride Lonesome.  Broken Lance.  The Burning Hills.  Jubal.  The Man from Laramie.

Big Studio Romantic Comedies and Dramas!

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing.  Pillow Talk.  How to Marry a Millionaire.

Grand Musicals!

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  It's Always Fair Weather.  Brigadoon.  Oklahoma!  Silk Stockings.  April Love.  Carmen Jones.  There's No Business Like Show Business.

Action Films and Thrillers!

House of Bamboo.  King of the Khyber Rifles.  Battle Cry.  World Without End.  Bad Day at Black Rock.

Intimate Family Dramas About Mental Illness!

Wait.

What?

Intimate family dramas about mental illness.  Or more specifically, a small family drama that takes place only inside the schoolroom, the hospital room, and the home, where most of the acting is internal and where the drama focuses on the father's steady decline into psychosis.

You could perform this story as a quiet play on a small stage in a black-box theatre with only 30 seats.

The setting and action are small.

The film is Bigger Than Life.

What a great idea, actually.

Would that more films were made to be presented in such a large format.

After all, this is not television.

This is the movies!

Imagine the emotional impact of a subtle expression in extreme close-up.

Bigger Than Life stars James Mason.  You may know him as the bad guy Philip Vandamm, the one who kidnaps Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest, or in a similar kind of role opposite Paul Newman in The Verdict, or as the co-star with Judy Garland in A Star is Born.  He also played Captain Nemo in that other CinemaScope picture listed above, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

James Mason is one of those actors whom, once you hear his voice, you want to keep hearing it for a very long time.  His voice is made out of maple syrup spiked with bourbon.  He does not merely speak.  He taps the sap at the sugar shack and drips a slow flow of sweet aromatic maple with a toasted oak aroma, a cereal malt grain, and a brown cinnamon spice.

Thick.  Rich.  Sweet.  And slow.

And what does he say with this rich voice?

He plays schoolteacher Ed Avery, and he begins the film by talking shop, the ordinary daily routine with his colleagues.  When he leaves for the day, he goes to his moonlighting job at the cab company.  He tells his wife he has a school board meeting.  He is ashamed to tell her he works two jobs.  He has a spending problem.

The first sign of disease occurs when they have some friends over.  He spends time in the kitchen leaning over the refrigerator.  He does not feel well.  When the evening is over, he complains to his wife that they are dull, all of them, and that they never do anything interesting.  Then he falls across the bed.

After being tested at the hospital, he is told that he has a terminal type of inflammation of the arteries and has only months to live.  He is prescribed cortisone and suddenly feels great again.  He indulges his manic feelings and takes the family out to dinner and on an excessive shopping spree.  His own son whispers to his mother that Dad is acting foolishly.

Avery grows dependent on the pills.  He begins taking them more frequently than his prescription allows.  He reasons that a teacher is a doctor, so he convinces a pharmacist that he is a doctor and begins prescribing more pills for himself.

He grows excessively moodier.  He speaks bluntly at the PTA meeting, insulting some of those present and causing them to walk out, while becoming a hero to one parent, who thinks he is the first teacher he has heard to describe things the way they really are.

He begins to push his son, yelling at him, forcing him to practice football during baseball season, and throwing the ball so hard and far that the boy falls and hurts himself in his efforts to catch it, only to be reprimanded all the more.

Avery starts to grow mad, reading the Genesis account of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac as some kind of assignment for himself.  He goes so far as to raise a pair of scissors above his son in his son's room before the boy escapes.

The film will end either badly or well.

It is an effort to educate the public on the challenges of mental illness and addiction to prescription drugs.  And it is sympathetic.  It portrays the family and friends as loving and patient.

Jerry Mathers has a great moment in it.  He plays one of the school kids.  His character Freddie has painted something that looks angry.  Avery asks if it is a thunderstorm.  He responds defiantly, "This is a man.  He's just mad at his mother!"  One year later he was starring on television in Leave It to Beaver.

James Mason wanted very much to make this movie, so when the studios balked he produced it himself.  Nicholas Ray directed it, just one year after making Rebel Without a Cause.