Bigger Than Life

Dad goes berserk in ‘Bigger Than Life’

JAMES MASON (far right) wants the best for his wife, played by Barbara Rush, in "Bigger Than Life."

Ed Avery was a junior high teacher in the 1950s.
He had a good rapport with the kids. He obviously enjoyed his job. But this is the 1950s. He didn’t make much money.
He certainly could not expect his wife to work, so he gets a second job at a taxi cab company.
But Avery’s world goes into more disarray when he suddenly has blackouts.
“Bigger Than Life” stars the great James Mason as Avery in this story of 50s family bliss that turns ugly.
That nonworking wife, Lou, is beautiful and wears a dress and earrings while working about the house. She is played by Barbara Rush.
Christopher Olsen plays their son, Richie.
Mason goes to a physician to find out why he is having the blackouts. The doctor discovers a rare disease and prescribes a steroid, cortisone, to treat him.
He becomes dependent on the drug and makes excuses to obtain extra prescriptions.
It quickly causes changes in his personality. At a parent-teacher conference, he lectures the shocked parents about what is wrong with their children, while lighting up a cigarette. Apparently even in the 1950s, you don’t light up in school.
At home his manic-depressive personality shows.
He wants his son to be more competitive in football and announces if he misses another catch, he won’t get lunch.
His actions and personality become more bizarre. His best friend and fellow teacher, Walter Matthau, is concerned as well.
The film has been compared with the more recent “The Shining,” in which Jack Nicholson and his family live in an isolated resort alone for the winter to handle routine maintenance. But Nicholson slowly descends into insanity.
In “Bigger Than Life,” Mason’s character gets more and more irrational. He demands to know why a glass of milk is missing from the pitcher.
When son decides to find the offending pills and dump them, Dad really gets angry. He quotes the Bible and comes to the shocking conclusion he must kill his son.
The movie was filmed in Cinemascope, a process requiring a larger screen and was designed to fight competition from the small screen, that being television.
The movie is decidedly 50s. Even when her husband acted bizarre, wife was respectful and agreeable because that’s what wives did. It was only when he got to the point maybe the child should die she decided he was a bit too unreasonable.
Today, a father who sits around the house wearing a bowtie would seem strange enough. In Mason’s world, it was perfectly permissible.
Special kudos goes to Christopher Olsen, playing the young boy who sees his father descend into madness. Olsen made several films but stopped acting in 1959 after a couple of episodes of “Lassie.”
As an aside, Marilyn Monroe was making “Bus Stop” on an adjoining stage at 20th Century Fox and appeared in a cameo as a nurse. But the scene was cut because the studio worried Monroe would use it as the second film she was required to do under her contract.
This is a gripping film worth watching, not just for the story and actors, but the overall tone and great 50s atmosphere.


BIGGER THAN LIFE • Directed by Nicholas Ray, written by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum • Not rated, too intense for young children • Runtime: 95 minutes • 3 1/2 stars out of 4