Review of Bigger Than Life

(Written after my second viewing of this picture: first viewing, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, some years ago; today's viewing at Film Forum, NYC) I went to see this film today with some excitement, but also some trepidation. It had made an impact on first viewing, but, apart from memories jogged by stills seen in the interim, little had stuck with me -- perhaps just a vague recollection of a balls-out James Mason performance. (In that I was not disappointed.) This film has long been a keystone in Nicholas Ray's reputation, being viewed as a bold tale told with the full resources of Technicolor and CinemaScope. Well, it's in Technicolor (actually DeLuxe Color) and Cinemascope. But it's not much of a tale, and it's not told very well. Ray's cinema, it's true, has some impressive moments, often in color and 'scope. Certainly "Johnny Guitar" is a near-masterpiece, "Rebel" is filled with great things (and some very obvious Freudian mumbo-jumbo), "Party Girl" (my favorite Ray)'s unsuppressed violence spills over into its visual world with a fabulous abandon, "King of Kings" is by far the best of the (generally miserable) late 50's/early 60's epics, and, in black and white, "In a Lonely Place" is a complex, beautiful film. But Ray has serious weaknesses as well, and they are abundantly clear in "Bigger Than Life." As a piece of story-telling, first of all, it is clumsy, and, surprisingly, in its first 45 minutes, even stodgy (even though the script is reputed to have been "entirely reworked" by Ray and Gavin Lambert). And very stodgily staged (the scenes with the three doctors are fairly excruciating), like some of Sirk's drearier moments. There is a real lack of feeling for how people actually move and speak. It's true that, once Mason is in high-gear on cortisone, the temperature of the film rises considerably, but the reactions to him are scripted in unbelievable fashion. One finds oneself feeling superior to the characters in a way that can't have been intended: they are acting stupidly when we are supposed to believe they are doing the best they can (or at least normally). Barbara Rush (as Mason's wife) looks very pretty, but has no life of her own. Obviously this female submission is intended as a 'critique of contemporary mores', but the film has not created a world of its own wide enough to sustain such a wide-ranging critique. All in all (I really can't bear to go on) this feels like a "social problem" film gone wildly astray. Ray was clearly (and, let me add, commendably) interested in and committed to worthy (liberal) causes, but neglected his obviously real gifts as a film artist. (Whether he had great gifts as a film storyteller is another matter, perhaps.) But I think to compare him to Otto Preminger, among others, and find Preminger wanting is the height of folly. Sure, Preminger made some bad pictures, but almost all of them are in the post-1966 post-studio period, when NOBODY seemed to be able to make a good picture. Ray had made his last film by then, having made a mess of "55 Days at Peking" (which turned out fairly well anyway, though finished by others) and become unhirable (drug and alcohol abuse being the culprits). It's sad, but it's time to look at the pictures themselves. "Bigger Than Life," "Wind Across the Everglades" (disastrous in almost every respect), "Hot Blood" (weak, though enjoyable) are not great pictures, despite their "Nick Ray" branding. And that thing that Win Wenders made is hard to forgive...

Incidental notes: Gus Schilling, who had played the druggist in "The Magnificent Ambersons" some fifteen years previously, plays a similar role here. And the milkman here is the same actor (Richard Collier) as the milkman in "The Girl Can't Help It" and a dead ringer for the milkman in "Imitation of Life" (David Tomack)!