BIGGER THAN LIFE: exploding the myth of the nuclear family

BIGGER THAN LIFE is a brutal full-frontal assault on Eisenhower-era American family life.
Director Nicholas Ray exposes a reality distinctly at odds with the cosy paternalism of the nuclear family depicted in so many movies and tv shows of the time.

James Mason is schoolteacher Ed Avery, a man with a perfect wife, Lou (Barbara Rush) and a tousle-haired son (Richie). They live in a spacious, well furnished home in an unnamed New England town and life appears, on the surface, to be good.
But Ed's hiding a secret from his family. Several afternoons a week after school he heads to a second job, working as a dispatcher for a cab company. He's doing it for the money but he doesn't think his wife would approve.
But that's just a tiny crack in the facade of perfection compared to the enormous fissure that opens up when Ed's diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease and starts abusing Cortisone, the brand new miracle drug he's prescribed to keep him alive and healthy. He becomes psychotic. What starts out as a surfeit of physical energy escalates into rampant obsession, egotism, authoritarianism and talk of murder.
While it's slightly disconcerting to watch Mason play an American schoolteacher with no explanation offered for his obvious Britishness, he does a good job of portraying Ed's descent into psychosis. By the time his illness reaches it's final stages he is a genuinely terrifying figure, capable of doing absolutely anything including ritually sacrificing his own son.
It's Barbara Rush, though who has the toughest part to play. For the story to work she has to be convincing in her reluctance to call in outside assistance, even though her husband's behaviour is threatening to destroy everything that they have. Given her obvious intelligence and instinct to protect her son it would not have been plausible for her to simply have folded under the pressure and acquiesced to Ed's deluded ranting. 
Her success in portraying Lou's conflicted loyalties allows us to believe in the story. My one reservation is that it all happens too fast. The film's ninety five minute running time is not enough to allow events to unfold in what should feel like real time. Ed goes from normal to crazy in 45 minutes and the pace feels forced. In retrospect, I should have realised that the unseemly speed with which the opening titles were flashed on the screen was a subtle indicator of the pace of the storytelling ahead.   
The Criterion label, which is releasing BIGGER THAN LIFE on DVD later this month, describes it as "one of the great American films of the 1950s." That's an exaggeration, but it is an interesting film. I wouldn't recommend buying it, but it's definitely worth renting.