ICE-Vision: Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
Thursday, September 22 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.
“One of the best, most radical, and least-known American films of the 1950s.” -Village Voice
“Nicholas Ray’s potent 1956 CinemaScope melodrama dealt with the ill effects of cortisone on a frustrated middle-class grammar-school teacher (James Mason) at about the same time that the first wave of “wonder” drugs hit the market. But the true subject of this deeply disturbing picture is middle-class values – about money, education, culture, religion, patriarchy, and “getting ahead.” These values are thrown into bold relief by the hero’s drug dependency and resulting megalomania, which leads to shocking and tragic results for his family (Barbara Rush and Robert Simon) as well as himself. Ray’s use of ‘Scope framing and color to delineate the hero’s dreams and dissatisfactions has rarely been as purposeful. (It’s hard to think of another Hollywood picture with more to say about the sheer awfulness of “normal” American family life during the 50s.) With Walter Matthau in an early noncomic role as the hero’s best friend; scripted by Cyril Hume, Richard Maibum, and an uncredited Clifford Odets” -Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader)