One poster version for director Nicholas Ray's 1956 neglected classic film "Bigger Than Life".
By David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
Bigger Than Life (1956)
Director: Nicholas Ray
I’ve really begun to love and search out melodramatic film, especially the works of Douglas Sirk, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray. On its face, the premise of Ray’s “Bigger Than Life” (1956) might seem laughable by today’s standard, despite being based on a real article by medical writer Berton Roueche written for the New Yorker in 1955: A 1950s button-down school teacher named Ed Avery moonlights as a taxi dispatcher in order to make more money for his family. He hides this fact from his wife, Lou (Barbara Rush), because he believes she’ll think he’s working beneath his station. But the stress of managing two jobs and keeping up the charade run him into the ground. Ed is hit with crippling pains, passes out at home, and is taken to the hospital where he is diagnosed with a potentially fatal inflammation of the arteries. The doctors tell him he needs to take a prescription — the new “miracle drug” cortisone. He starts pill-popping, which makes him irritable, manic and eventually psychotic. He wreaks havoc across the provincial dinner table, becomes unhinged — brow-beating his kid into studying harder, measuring the amount of milk in the jug so mom doesn’t give junior an unearned drink, and berating the boy for his lack of receiving skills in a backyard tossing of the football. Ed continues his erratic behavior, buying lavish dresses for his wife that he can’t afford. He shows up at a parent-teacher conference and tells the families, “Childhood is a congenital disease — and the purpose of education is to cure it. We’re breeding a race of moral midgets.” This is the long slide into Greek tragedy and bedlam. Daddy Dearest turns his little patch of suburbia and the white picket fence into ‘Nightmare on Quotidian Street’, ultimately threatening to sacrifice his child to God with a pair of scissors, like some bizarre version of the Biblical story of Abraham and Issac.
There’s a scene that at first glance feels schmaltzy enough to leave some film goers rolling in the aisles over its perceived lack of credulity. The little boy says with melodramatic flair, after trying to hide his father’s pills, “I’d rather you were dead than the way you are now!” (Cue door slam.) But there’s something of weight underneath all that bluster. Ray’s best films tend to be a struggle between the grandiosity of emotion in a big Hollywood/Warner Brothers picture and his auteur sense of style — whether it’s “Party Girl” (1958) or the famed “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955). The true value of “Bigger Than Life” is just below the surface of the exaggerated plot-line. Avery is going insane, which feels histrionic perhaps in respect to degree. But beyond the plot lies the suggestive, ambiguous aura of the film. There’s another kind of insanity going on in the Eisenhower ’50s. It’s the burden of trying to keep up false facades. It’s the struggle of trying to maintain outward appearances of success — which includes holding a good job, having a sweet wife with a smile as buttery warm as an Eggo waffle, and a nice house that runs as smoothly as a hand across the leather interior of a Ford Thunderbird. (And not necessarily in that order.) It means presenting an upbeat public persona, devoid of idiosyncrasy. It means taking one’s pills as prescribed — a symbolism far greater than the outward following of a doctor’s orders. Ray’s film is a fight against the grey banality of sensibility and stale reason. During one memorable scene, after a get-together at the Avery house, Ed tells his wife that all their friends are dull. To his wife’s dismay he takes it a step further, declaring, “We’re dull!” He dares Lou to recall one memorable, original or creative thing said by anyone at their little gathering. She can’t.
So, what is melodrama exactly? It’s the rising strings in the soundtrack to Sirk’s “Magnificent Obsession” (1954) right at the moment Helen Phillips tells off Bob Merrick in their second face-to-face encounter. It’s also Constance Towers’ purse-smacking P.O.V. shot in Fuller’s “The Naked Kiss” (1964), where she brandishes a seltzer bottle and knocks her pimp upside the head as he snatches the wig off her newly shaved head. It’s also the scene in “Bigger Than Life”, where Lou accidentally smashes the bathroom mirror while having an argument with Ed. Melodrama is an exaggeration in plot and emotion, often used to pull an audience into the passions of a film. It’s shouting with a megaphone. Sometimes it’s a campy outpouring of pathos or a stereotyped characterization. The most interesting thing about melodramatic film is the point at which it moves from seduction of the audience into irony. Naturally, it exists as pure artifice. It’s the fingerprint of the artist, director, screenwriter or actor. But at what point during the picture is Ray being ironic or giving us a wink and a nod? The specific term originated from the early 19th-century French word mélodrame, derived from Greek melos (music) and French drame (drama). Oftentimes when we think of high melodrama it’s in the pejorative sense, like in a TV soap opera — but when done right it’s like putting music to the words. It can turn the one-dimensional into 3-D. Or give echo to something that’s already obvious.
The cinematic style of “Bigger Than Life” (Joseph MacDonald) adds to the melodrama of the film, especially in the latter sequences, when Ed confronts his son about doing a math problem. The point of view is from one end of the child’s bedroom, the camera low and tilted upward, borrowing from the language of film noir. The child struggles, guessing rather than thinking through the math problem. Ed stands, looming over his son, his long, dark shadow cast against the wall twice as large as the man — as if there were another person in the room. It’s far from subtle, but it is exquisite. It’s miles away from the delicate delights of a filmmaker like Krzysztof Kieślowski, but Ray’s intent isn’t meant to be refined. It’s meant to create real terror, and it works. It’s obvious Ray knows what he’s doing. This isn’t the accidental melodrama of a mediocrity. The film title itself is a giant neon clue suggesting the film’s amplification of everything. But Ray keeps the film from devolving into pure boilerplate. The anxiety is real. The acting is real. The horror is real. And however high the hokum of the plot, those things keep the film grounded in the grit. The movie was a commercial flop in its day. But truly brilliant melodrama often needs the passage of time for its outer layers to dissolve into its inner ones. Some films are simply ahead of their time. The ending to “Bigger Than Life” is more akin to Production Code-era conclusions, but there’s still a buried truth within it: Somewhere in Anywhere, U.S.A., after the film has finished, the Avery family will continue with the lingering dread of reemerging terror, or continue in slow inertia, the hidden haunts of their American family life secreted away.
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