Bigger Than Life

NEW 35mm PRINT! ► James Mason’s towering performance and director Nicholas Ray’s tour-de-force use of CinemaScope and Technicolor are among the gargantuan glories of Bigger Than Life, one of the highpoints of 1950s Hollywood cinema. Described as “Rebel Without a Cause for the grown-up world” (Chris Auty, Time Out), the film screens here in a gorgeous new 35mm print. Mason plays a mild-mannered, bow-tied schoolteacher and family man living the dull life in Norman Rockwell suburbia. Plagued by a debilitating illness, he’s prescribed a miracle drug (cortisone) as the cure. The drug’s side effects unleash this repressed man’s demons and, to the horror of all, transform him into a malevolent, megalomaniacal monster. (“God was wrong!” he thunders at one crucial point.) Inspired by a nonfiction piece published in The New Yorker, Ray’s hair-raising drama shares territory with the subversive 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk (whose Magnificent Obsession screens in our November program). “One of the greatest views of the hidden fractures of family life and the demons that, for some, remain happily below the surface . . . Mason disturbingly combines intellect, sensibility, and rage. The muted palette of Ray’s images is slashed by eruptions of luridly bright color” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker). “A self-conscious poet of American disenchantment . . . No one made CinemaScope so glorious a shape as Ray” (David Thomson, The Biographical Dictionary of Film). Colour, 35mm. 95 mins.

Plays in a double-bill with Elia Kazan's Wild River.