 |
|||
 |
Empty
|
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
Bigger Than Life
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Our DVD Price: £15.99 RRP: 
Availability In Stock - should be despatched within 24 hours. This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times
Earn 75 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info |
Film Description
James Mason plays Ed Avery, schoolteacher and family man, who, when he is told he has only months to live, agrees to an experimental Cortisone treatment. He makes a remarkable recovery and returns home, but his miracle cure begins to turn into a nightmare as the tablets cause increasingly wild mood swings that free him to tell what he truly feels about the facade of 'normal' American family life. One of cinema's most persuasive portraits of psychological turmoil, the film also succeeds magnificently as searing melodrama and subversive social critique. One of the great American films of the 1950s and perhaps Ray's real masterpiece.
Film Information
| Director | Nicholas Ray | ||||
| Starring | Walter Matthau, James Mason, Barbara Rush
|
||||
| Genre | Classic Film
|
||||
| Country | USA | Language | English | Year | 1956 |
DVD Extras
Commentary by Edward Buscombe; Conversation between Jim Jarmusch and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Extracts from 1969 interview with Nicholas Ray; Illustrated booklet with essays by Geoff Andrew, Jeanine Basinger, Susan Ray and more.
Technical Details
| Certificate | 12 | Length | 91 mins | Label | BFI | ||
| Cat No | BFIVD672 | Format | DVD | Colour | |||
| Region | 2 | Aspect | 2.35 Anamorphic Wide Screen | ||||
| Subtitles | English. | ||||||
3 Stills
 |
 |
Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review
Review by Doug Cummings on 17th August 2007
Back in the 1950s, when French film critics championed a few Hollywood filmmakers for their ability to imprint studio films with highly personal, authorial voices (such as Hitchcock, Hawks, and Fuller), no one was more lauded than Nicholas Ray: ‘The cinema is Nicholas Ray,’ Jean-Luc Godard famously wrote in 1957. (Later, in Made in USA, Godard dedicated his film to “Nick and Samuel, who taught me respect for image and sound.”) Taken as a whole, Ray’s cinema (including In a Lonely Place, Bitter Victory, and Rebel Without a Cause) quickly became known for its obsessive, anguished protagonists, widescreen visual beauty (not for nothing did Ray study architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright), and perhaps most importantly, its intense alienation from the cheery conformity of postwar American culture.
Bigger Than Life (1956) – a classic Hollywood melodrama long absent on video – has finally received its DVD debut, and it might just be Ray’s masterpiece. A genteel schoolteacher named Ed Avery (deliciously played by James Mason) suddenly finds his inner demons clawing out from his psyche after he undergoes ‘wonder drug’ treatments for a fatal disease; though it spares his life, the drug releases Avery’s repressed anger and megalomania on those around him. The film is ingeniously conceived: what at first seems like a critique of the medical establishment gradually expands in scope to encompass every aspect of Avery’s life as schoolteacher, husband, and parent, thus taking on major pillars of the American Dream and revealing their dark undercurrents of domination and control.
Ray uses color, setting, and gesture in spectacular ways, emphasizing fiery reds and oranges to suggest Avery’s mounting delirium, filming his climactic scene on a staircase with as much dramatic tension as a Hitchcock thriller, and – in a process Ray described as ‘hunting for the truth of the scene’ – generating intense emotions through the expressions and psychology of his actors.
Ray’s maverick energy (including his own alcohol and chemical abuses) eventually resulted in a fight with cancer he couldn’t win, but he left audiences with a series of deeply felt films, often as self-critical and clear-sighted as virtually any in cinema.
View more reviews by Doug Cummings
Recommendations from fellow customers
More films directed by Nicholas Ray
More films starring James Mason
by Max Ophuls
by Sidney Lumet
More films starring Walter Matthau
by Billy Wilder
by Gene Kelly
by Gene Saks
More films starring Barbara Rush
by Jack Arnold
| Special Offers | ||||||||||||||||
|
More Great Offers
|
| BestSellers | ||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Recommended by MovieMail | ||||||||||
|
A curated collection of the best DVDs
Latest Additions
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
| Just Released |
|
Water Lilies Screen Icons: Richard Attenborough Roberta Around the World in 80 Gardens You, the Living |
| Coming Soon |
|
La Vie de Jesus (Masters of Cinema) Up the Yangtze 1900 Black Five: The Last Days of Steam The Orphanage |
|
||
| Home | Film Catalogue | New Releases | Special Offers | Top 30 | ||
|
||
| Film Collections | Film Media | News | Your Account | Help | Become a MovieMail affiliate | ||
|
||
For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk © 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail |
||
|
Journey To Italy
The Leopard
Bande à Part
Le Doulos
Le Cercle Rouge
