Bigger Than Life (1956)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Nicholas Ray

As Bigger Than Life opens, we see the long horizontal façade of a school building stretched across the huge CinemaScope screen. A bell rings, and elementary school students come pouring through the doorway, walk toward the camera, and separate to the left and right as they reach it. Among the last children to leave are three sets of twins—two boys, two girls, and finally a boy and girl—who walk toward the camera without separating. What an appropriate beginning for a movie that is essentially Nicholas Ray's 1950s suburban version of Robert Louis Stevens's classic doppelgänger tale Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, beautifully restored and newly released by Criterion.

The main character is Ed Avery (James Mason), a teacher at the school. With a modern two-story house, attractive wife (Barbara Rush), and son about the same age as his students, he seems to be living the kind of middle-class life found in television sitcoms of the time. But all is not well with the Avery family. Ed is having difficulty making ends meet on his teacher's salary and must supplement his income by working on the sly three afternoons a week as a dispatcher for a local taxi company. More distressingly, he is suffering some kind of major health problem, from time to time clutching his stomach in severe pain, having headaches and dizzy spells, and occasionally even blacking out. When his wife finally persuades him to see a doctor, Ed is diagnosed with Periarteritis nodosa, chronic inflammation of the arteries, a severe condition that if untreated will kill him within a year. Fortunately, a newly released "wonder drug," the steroid cortisone, deals successfully with his symptoms and offers him a hopeful prognosis.

What Ed doesn't realize is that the drug can have severe psychological side effects. He soon begins acting erratically, swinging between euphoria and moodiness. Within weeks he has become a full-blown madman—behaving impulsively, erupting into sudden rages, and exhibiting symptoms of extreme megalomania and paranoia. Subjecting his students and family to tyrannical whims and edicts, he institutes a fanatical reign of terror in his classroom and at home. He pompously tells members of the P.T.A. that their children are spoiled and backward, with the mental development of gorillas. He forces his son to endure a merciless regimen of physical and mental training. He finally announces to his wife that she is his intellectual inferior, that he has "outgrown" her, and that he is leaving her to embark on a lifelong project to write a book that will revolutionize education. The wonder drug has transformed the affable school teacher and loving husband and father into a human monster.

James Mason confronts his monstrous alter ego in the bathroom mirror

Two things lift Bigger Than Life above its occasionally trite plot and its pat conclusion. One is the amazing performance by James Mason, who also produced the film, as Ed Avery, a performance that alone makes the movie well worth seeing. Ed's startling change from a reserved, rather meek man dedicated to his profession and his family into a pill-popping psychotic wracked by delusions of grandeur is unnervingly convincing. As his life spins more and more out of control, he alternates between obliviousness to the behavioral changes taking place in him and, in moments of lucidity, horrified awareness of his rampant mental deterioration. It is a chilling, expertly calibrated performance, one of Mason's very finest and almost certainly the most ambitious of his notable career.

Also impressive is the vision of this suburban horror story created by director Nicholas Ray. Ray studied architecture before turning to a career in films, and strongly evocative interiors are often an important part of his movies. In Bigger Than Life the contrast between the innocuous, rather bland middle-class interior of Ed's house, where much of the film takes place, and his extravagant behavior is a striking one. Yet there are subtle indications of Ed's already existing subconscious dissatisfaction with his conventional life. The distorted shape of the CinemaScope screen, especially noticeable in these interior segments, suggests a personality that already senses the need to expand to fill the empty spaces in its life. The walls of the house, covered in framed maps and travel posters of places like Rome, Paris, and Florence, hint at a desire by Ed to leave behind the ordinariness of his present life for something more fulfilling. The images of doors and doorways that fill the movie echo this same sense of entrapment in present circumstances and the repressed longing to break free. There are literally countless shots of people opening or closing doors, coming through doorways, standing in open doorways or in front of closed doors, or simply photographed from a distance through doorways of all sizes and types. Ray uses all these things to intimate that the changes in Ed's personality are not so much metamorphosis as the unleashing of unconscious urges previously held in check.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the movie is that it is based on an actual case history recounted in the New Yorker by Berton Roueché (1910-1994), a journalist who worked nearly fifty years for the magazine, writing for its "Annals of Medicine" section. The true medical mysteries that form the basis of his articles are fascinating stories of people with mystifying symptoms—many of whom are dismissed as hypochondriacs or told that their problems are psychological and referred to psychiatrists—whose illness is finally diagnosed through the perseverance of an individual doctor or researcher. The several collections of these articles Roueché published are highly recommended, as compellingly readable as the best mystery fiction.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Nicholas Ray

It's taken me more than one viewing to warm completely to In a Lonely Place. In the film Humphrey Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter who finally gets the chance to work on an adaptation of a best-selling novel. Unfortunately, the novel is clearly trash, and the assignment clearly hack work. Still, it just might jumpstart his failed career. After Dix is wrongfully implicated in the murder of a hatcheck girl from the Hollywood bar he frequents, he begins a romance with Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a neighbor in the Hollywood bungalow court where he lives, who gives him an alibi but isn't really sure he's innocent. (Grahame, who was married to Nicholas Ray at the time, is quite good in one of her rare lead roles—watch the way emotions subtly register on her face in close-ups.) To complicate matters further, during the war Dix was the commanding officer of the detective investigating the murder (Frank Lovejoy), a man whose contented family life and straightforward view of the world are the opposite of Dix's isolation and tangle of confused attitudes.

I think what initially distanced me from the film is something I now see as one of its prime virtues—that while it contains elements of familiar genres of the time, in the end it doesn't really conform to any one of them. It resembles those pictures like A Star Is Born and Sunset Blvd. that show the unflattering side of Hollywood. Like those films, it depicts life in the motion picture industry as a precarious one where it is too often necessary to sell out to achieve career success, where success can turn to failure with one flop, where those branded as failures are shunned as pariahs. It is a story of postwar alienation, of a man who seems unable to return to civilian life and simply resume where he left off. It is also in part a murder mystery, a police procedural, and one of those films in the Hitchcock/Lang vein that show a falsely accused man trapped in a web of circumstance. It is at the same time the story of an unlikely romance between two people very different from each other. Yet the film never settles completely into any of these predictable genres.

Equally unpredictable and category-defying is Bogart's interpretation of Dix. In the end, though, it is his character that ties all those disparate elements together, for ultimately the movie is a character study of one of the most intricate and compelling men to be found in films of the era, a man whose personal and professional lives have hit bottom and whose greatest obstacle to his way back is himself. Bogart makes the most of the role and delivers one of his most intriguing performances. He seems to bring something of nearly every part he had ever played to Dix. With his sudden rages and explosive aggression, Dix can be as scary as any of Bogart's early gangsters, even though these outbursts are always followed by remorse. Dix is as coldly cynical as Bogart's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, as disappointed and bitter—but still susceptible to the allure of love—as his Rick in Casablanca, at times as caustically witty as his Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. This is a man whose self-loathing is projected onto the entire world around him and whose mistrust of other people approaches the paranoia of Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Yet Dix is not merely a synthesis of Bogart's previous roles, but rather a unique creation that advances Bogey's screen persona further into anguish and ambiguity than he had ever taken it before.

By the end of the movie, most of Dix's problems have sorted themselves out. But the one thing that can't be put right is his relationship with Laurel. His need to control her—his suspicion, possessiveness, and demands for total, unquestioning loyalty—eventually prove too much for her. "Dix doesn't act like a normal person. . . . I'm scared. I don't trust him," she finally admits, realizing the relationship is doomed. Cleared of a murder charge and with his script finally completed, Dix may be a free man with a revived career. But that freedom and success will not be shared. Dix is a man driven by self-destructive inner forces beyond his control, a man destined to be marooned by his own inability to trust others.

On Dangerous Ground: A Neglected Masterwork by Nicholas Ray

The American film director Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) was little appreciated during his heyday in Hollywood in the 1950s. But in 1950s France the young movie critics and future filmmakers of the original Cahiers du Cinéma generation revered him as the epitome of the American auteur, the kind of director who managed to transcend the safe impersonality of studio-financed genre pictures and leave on them his own personal stamp. His films were a huge influence on the early directors of the French New Wave. Jean-Luc Godard went so far as to state, "Le cinéma, c'est Nicholas Ray" ("Nicholas Ray is cinema").

Ray's best known films are Rebel Without a Cause (1955), his masterpiece, the movie that made James Dean a star and contains his defining performance as the alienated teenager Jim Stark; the tremendously entertaining Johnny Guitar (1954), Ray's bizarrely stylized, almost Gothic take on the Western; In a Lonely Place (1950), in which Ray revealed the darkest, most sinister side of Hollywood and of Humphrey Bogart (his Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Capt. Queeg in The Caine Mutiny notwithstanding); and Ray's first film, They Live by Night (1949), one of the great films noirs of the late 1940s, a hybrid of romance and fatalism, with its young bank robber and his lover doomed from the beginning, and a clear influence on early French New Wave films as well as the later Bonnie and Clyde. The Criterion release in 2010 of Bigger Than Life (1956), with its brilliant performance by James Mason as a teacher driven to madness by the side effects of a new drug, drew renewed attention to yet another of Ray's best films.

Alongside these movies stands a film of equal merit in Ray's oeuvre, On Dangerous Ground (1952). (It was actually made in 1950 but wasn't released for two years, while RKO tinkered with the film, shortening it by about ten minutes and forcing Ray to shoot a new, more upbeat ending.) This is a movie of more subtle appeal than those better-known works. Quieter, less dense, and less quirky, it nonetheless has many of the same virtues and thematic preoccupations as those films and really should be considered one of Ray's key works.

The main character of On Dangerous Ground is a police detective in an unnamed big city, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan, in one of his rare lead roles, giving one of the very best performances of his impressive career). Like the main characters in so many of Ray's films, Wilson suffers from a profound sense of alienation from other people and from his environment. The opening sequence of the movie emphasizes his status as a loner with little connection to life except through his job. It begins without explanation after dark with a middle-aged man whose wife is helping him strap on a holstered gun under his suit jacket. He then drives to a suburban house where another middle-aged man, watching television with his children, is being helped into a holster and gun by his wife. The scene then switches to a shabby studio apartment where Ryan stands alone before a mirror strapping on his gun and holster and waits for the other two men to pick him up. These three could easily be criminals preparing for a heist. But they aren't: they're a team of police detectives reporting to the precinct before going out on night patrol.

For the next twenty minutes or so, the movie follows them around dark city streets as they look for a pair of criminals. It is soon clear that Wilson is more than just an upholder of the law. He channels all of his hostility and disillusionment into his job. This is a man with such a grudge against the world that he is close to being a brutal sadist—"a gangster with a badge," as his commanding officer describes him at one point. His two colleagues don't approve of his vigilante approach to law enforcement, but they understand how the job has corroded his sense of ethics. "All we ever see is crooks, murderers, stoolies, dames. . . . 'Til you find out it's different, it's kind of a lonely life," explains one of his partners to the other. And that statement exactly foreshadows what will happen during the course of the movie: Wilson will find out that there is more to life than what he experiences daily and by reconnecting to others will reconnect to himself and to the larger world.

After Wilson becomes too violent with a small-time criminal, his chief sees the need to get him out of the way for a while and sends him out of the city and into a remote mountain area to help the sheriff there investigating a killing. At this point the movie shifts gears completely, and it is this sudden change that leads Wilson to his epiphany. The victim of the killing is a young girl, and Wilson soon becomes completely involved not in helping the sheriff apprehend the suspected killer, but in controlling the girl's grief-stricken father, who is determined to track down the murderer himself and kill him. This vigilantism is too much even for Wilson, and he finds himself accompanying the grieving and enraged father to prevent him from carrying out his intentions. The father, Walter Brent, is played by Ward Bond. If you are used to seeing him playing innocuous bit roles or providing cornball comedy relief in John Ford movies, you will be surprised at the malevolence he conveys in this part, as a man driven by the obsessive need for revenge.

When their car runs off a snowy road and overturns, the pair must continue their pursuit of the suspected killer on foot, and this leads them to an isolated ranch where a young blind woman, Mary Malden, lives. The men suspect her of harboring the criminal. Although she denies it, she is sheltering him, and he is her mentally disturbed, possibly autistic, young brother. Mary is played by Ida Lupino, and like Bond she is quite effective here playing against type. There is no abrasiveness or neuroticism—traits that Lupino was expert at conveying—in this character. And it is her gentleness, sensitivity, and caring nature that give Lupino's Beauty the power to tame Ryan's Beast.

Much in Ray's movies is built around the concept of contrast and opposition. Sometimes this is simple interpersonal conflict: between the teenagers and their parents and other adults in Rebel, between Joan Crawford and her nemesis Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar. Sometimes the conflict is more generalized: between Bogart and the Hollywood system in In a Lonely Place, between the criminal young lovers and the law in They Live by Night. In On Dangerous Ground, the main conflict is between people. This conflict, though, is not strictly personal, but rather between personality types and the ways those types view the world.

Andrew Sarris writes that "Robert Ryan [suffers from] disillusion with mankind in On Dangerous Ground," and I would say that is a succinct and accurate summation of Jim Wilson's persona. But Wilson himself seems unaware of the true nature of his discontent, so focused is he on the corruption he witnesses around him. When he returns to his dreary, anonymous apartment after his shift ends, the first thing he does is go to the basin and wash his hands. Then he looks at them in disgust and washes them a second time—this time even more vigorously, as if trying to scrub away all the vileness he has been exposed to for the last several hours. He almost seems to be trying to strip away the contaminated skin from his own hands.

Wilson gains perspective about himself only after he leaves his familiar environment and is exposed to Jim Brent, the murdered girl's father, and Mary Malden, the killer's protective sister. These characters hold a mirror up to Wilson, forcing him to examine himself and consider for the first time what everyone else seems to realize about him—that his dissatisfaction with life is destroying him by creating an impenetrable barrier between him and the rest of the world.

Brent shows Wilson what he might ultimately become if he does not change the course he is on, how hatred, no matter what its origin, can become all-consuming. In Brent he sees someone whose rage is even greater than his own. Recognizing the destructive ugliness of himself reflected and magnified in Malden, he comes to realize that his own brutality makes him little different from those he despises. Instead of needing to be restrained himself, he is called on to become the restraining force on Brent, and this unaccustomed role reveals to him a side of himself of which he has been unaware. He sees that his rage fueled by disillusion can be controlled, indeed must be controlled, if he is not to become the monster he sees in Brent.

Mary also becomes a catalyst that causes Wilson to discover within himself a part of his personality that is new to him. Wilson's rigid, judgmental hostility is contrasted with Mary's gentle passivity and loyalty to her brother. Mary's selflessness and protective behavior show Wilson that it is possible to love something that is flawed. It allows him to accept imperfection and shows him that his intolerance of imperfection in the world around him is really a projection of his self-loathing and inability to accept his own flawed nature. And although Mary is quite independent and capable, she still brings out the protective instinct in Wilson. When he perceives that the beauty and nobility in her are the result of the tempering of her strength with gentleness, he is able to reconcile these opposing parts of his own personality.

Brent makes Wilson realize that his intolerance and lack of self-control are actually signs of weakness, while Mary makes him see that there is strength in tolerance, self-restraint, and empathy. If in classical tragedy the hero is brought down by some kind of imbalance in his personality, an exaggeration of some characteristic in his makeup that throws him off-center, then Wilson is in a way a tragic hero doomed by the excesses of his own nature. Yet despite its dark veneer, On Dangerous Ground is ultimately about tragedy averted, for Wilson's encounters with Brent and Mary cause a kind of balance to be restored within him and permit him to avoid a tragic fate.

As with the three main characters, Ray pursues his preoccupation with contrast and opposition in the settings of the film, and it is in this purely visual element of the movie that Ray shows how truly cinematic is his way of telling a story on film. "Few other directors had such a sense of the effect of locations and interiors on people's lives, or the visual or emotional relationship between indoors and outdoors," writes David Thomson. On Dangerous Ground could serve as an illustration of that statement.

In the opening sequence in which the three detectives gather, Ray uses their homes to tell us important things about them and in particular about Ryan's character, Jim Wilson. One of Wilson's colleagues lives is an apartment with his wife. The other is first seen in his suburban living room watching television with his four children. But the place where Wilson lives forms quite a contrast with the homey environments of his colleagues. For one thing, it is clear that he lives alone. It is also clear that he lives in a rented room in a rooming house; the presence of the wash basin in the room suggests a shared bathroom down the hall. This is a bleak, impersonal place, an ascetic environment inhabited by someone living a solitary existence, like a monk or even a prisoner.

As Wilson and his partners cruise around those city streets at night, we get a clear impression of darkness and squalor. This is archetypal film noir territory—damp urban streets illuminated by dim pools of light from streetlamps and by the garish neon signs of the sleazy bars and flophouses that line them. The buildings densely crowded together and looming over the level of the streets from which they are filmed, along with the cramped interiors of the seedy places Wilson visits searching for criminals, create an atmosphere that feels enclosed and oppressive. Everyone seems to be hemmed in, almost penned up. What a visual and atmospheric contrast the last two-thirds of the movie is, then. As soon as Wilson leaves the city, the film takes on a feeling of openness and space, and the stony, man-made harshness of the city is replaced with soft, flowing, snowy landscapes broken only by the occasional conifer. The perpetual night of the city is replaced here by natural light reflected everywhere.

The extended sequence in which Ryan and Bond pursue the killer on foot through this snowy landscape is one of the most striking in the entire movie. This sequence contains virtually no dialogue or interaction between the two. It is all motion, just the images of their tiny, dark figures, filmed largely in long shot, crossing the vast, white screen. What the sequence does have, though, is the powerful music of Bernard Herrmann, which reaches its peak here, a kind of tone poem of perpetual motion that prefigures Herrmann's later scores for Hitchcock in Vertigo and North by Northwest. This is cinema of absolute simplicity and purity. And every element in these austere landscapes suggests liberation just as strongly as the earlier cityscapes suggested confinement.

Just as striking is the farmhouse Mary Malden lives in, at which Wilson and Brent arrive near dark and end up spending the night. What a contrast this house is to both Wilson's cheerless room in the city and the by-now freezing outdoors. This is a house that wraps its inhabitants in a womb-like atmosphere. Everything about it is warm and cozy: the wood from which it is constructed, the soft light from the oil lamps, the fire burning in an open fireplace, the comfortable furniture. Things that seem a little odd about the house are quickly explained by Mary's blindness. The pot of ivy hanging in the middle of the main room just below the height of her head and immediately in front of a large doorway, the little glass wind chime beside the front door that tinkles in the draft every time the door is opened, the large piece of curved, polished wood near the fireplace—these are all cues to guide the blind woman through the house. This house is a threat-free zone, a place of refuge and security.

In the end, both the environment and the people he meets during his sojourn work their spell on Wilson. He is a man redeemed. The pat ending in which Wilson abruptly turns around on his way back to the city and returns to Mary, who having rejecting him changes her mind—an ending apparently imposed on Ray by the studio—is the only thing in the movie that doesn't quite ring true. But this is a minor quibble. The rest of the movie is a remarkable blend of realistic romanticism and detached cynicism, the exact blend of opposed but complementary attitudes found in Ray's best movies.