Bigger Than Life

Nicholas Ray’s blazing domestic horror show is a terrifying vision of the all-American family under siege from within. In a towering performance, James Mason plays a mild-mannered schoolteacher running himself ragged to provide for his family’s self-described “dull” suburban lifestyle. After he’s diagnosed with a rare, debilitating disease, he’s prescribed the new “miracle” drug cortisone. Lo and behold, it takes away his pain… but transforms him into a rampaging, manic-depressive monster (on his students: “We’re breeding a race of moral midgets”; on the Bible: “God was wrong”). Full of masterful, psychologically charged widescreen compositions, the film goes even farther than Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause in its savage deconstruction of Eisenhower-era masculinity. Digital restoration