What happens when the American Dream become a nightmare?
When the 1999 Best Picture winner American BEAUTY came out, its marketing campaign stressed for the audience to "look closer" at the typical American family; while I still enjoy Sam Mendes' debut film, I wish people had taken the film's famous tagline more to heart and sought out this obscure gem of a film, because it's both a time capsule of its time and it's one of the most ageless films of all time. James Mason delivers possibly his greatest performance under Nicholas Ray's trusted, fatherly direction (the master auteur also worked wonders exposing the surprising depth of Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in IN A LONELY PLACE (1950), Cyd Charisse and Robert Taylor in PARTY GIRL (1958), Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell in THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948) and of course the trio in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE) as a man going insane from 1950s repression. It's one of the greatest American films ever made that few Americans have actually seen (as of this writing it's not on Region-1 DVD), though Jean-Luc Godard, who named it one of the greatest American films of the 1950s and briefly referenced it in his film CONTEMPT (1963), and Martin Scorsese, who has written of its power and included clips in his great documentary A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH American MOVIES WITH MARTIN SCORSESE (1995), are big fans of this film.Nicholas Ray's CinemaScope masterpiece was criticized and neglected upon its initial release after his smash hit REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955). What did they expect from a filmmaker whose titles of films, especially his previous one, defined his existence? BIGGER THAN LIFE is his subtle, scathing attack on the suffocating 1950s conformity and the empty promise of the American Dream--to the hip indie crowd, this is the 50s answer to HALF NELSON (2005). Like his Humbert Humbert of LOLITA (1962), Mason plays a British intellect who falls from grace in America. On the surface this film is an attack on Cortisone (and to the publicity department at 20th Century Fox, this film refused to place blame on the doctors, instead making the whole film look like Mason's fault with such captions of a doctor saying "I prescribed it--HE misused it!"), but what came first, the drug or the social claustrophobia? The Cortisone didn't create Ed Avery's psychosis, it only highlighted it, and it certainly won't cure it (Ray once wryly said that the film "is about a miracle drug. I don't believe in miracles"). Even as he eschews religion ("GOD WAS WRONG!") and the school system ("We're breeding a race of moral midgets!") during his bouts of heightened egomania, some balancing on horrifyingly awful and terrifyingly true, he's never free from his repression, which makes the film's seemingly Hallmark Happy Ending all the more disturbing.
It's a masterpiece of repression, innocence lost, and, more simply, amazing film-making. I cannot stress how badly this film begs to be seen and rediscovered by a newer audience, not unlike how Hitchcock's VERTIGO received the respect it deserved after its initial lukewarm reception. God was wrong. Nicholas Ray was right.
score 10/10
Goodbye_Ruby_Tuesday 10 December 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1988363/35005
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