Review of Bigger Than Life (1956) by Andrew N — 15 Sep 2011

Huddersfield's greatest thesp - leather-larynxed James Mason - gives, to my mind, the finest performance of his long and illustrious career in this extraordinary film. He plays Ed Avery, a teacher and family man who becomes addicted to the Cortisone he's prescribed for his Polyarteritis nodosa, which is as nasty as it sounds.

His doctor warns him that depression can be a side-effect but neglects to mention to Avery that he could become psychotic too, which he does with gathering speed. Mason gives the most chilling portrayal of a man with mental illness that I've ever seen in a film - the calm and collected way in which he rationalises to his distraught wife just why he's going to have to go upstairs and kill their son is more startling and dramatic than any amount of mad, stary-eyed, thrashing about bonkersness.

This film didn't go down well in 1956 apart from with the French (that Jean-Luc Godard knew a good film when he saw one). Drug abuse wasn't a box office winner and some felt that the film represented an attack on American family values.

Watching it now in the year 2525, when one has become densensitised to such things to some extent, what is most striking is that it is actually a splendidly old-fashioned film at heart - a melodrama - and a very human and involving one at that - but one which has been gloriously subverted; made in CinemaScope with a palette of the boldest and most vivid colours.

Mason is the star of the show but he is well-supported by Barbara Rush as his wife Lou and Christopher Olsen as his son Richie: a child actor who acquits himself so well that, remarkably, you don't want to go upstairs and kill him yourself!