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CFS presents: Bigger Than Life

Monday, April 4 @ 7 PM / Music Box Theatre

ONLINE TICKET SALES END 2 HRS BEFORE SCREENING START. TICKETS WILL STILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR!

Bigger Than Life
Directed by Nicholas Ray 1956
Long after Technirama and Superscope were consigned to history books, the anamorphic widescreen process developed at 20th Century-Fox and branded as CinemaScope still remains synonymous for most cinephiles with cinematic grandeur. The first years of CinemaScope were overwhelmingly flush with biblical epics, Westerns, and other genre films heavy on visual splendor, but the formats early days also saw maverick directors like Vincente Minnelli and Henri-Georges Clouzot using the extra-wide canvas for projects far more personal and idiosyncratic than King Richard and the Crusaders. An adaptation of a New Yorker article about cortisone-induced psychosis, Nicholas Rays Bigger Than Life, maybe more than any other film the era produced, seems an especially strange candidate for CinemaScope, but then again pretty much everything about Bigger Than Life seems strange. James Mason stars as Ed Avery, a suburban school teacher trying to keep up a facade of domestic cheeriness until hes stricken with a painful and deadly vascular disease. Faced with only months to live, Ed begins a new experimental hormone treatment at his doctors behest and finds himself miraculously cured with a new lease on life. Somethings off about this new Ed, though, and his family and friends (including Walter Matthau in an early role as Eds best friend, Wally the gym teacher) start to worry when his behavior grows more aggressive and erratic with each fistful of medication he gobbles. In other hands, a film about a father driven to infanticide by the stuff you put on mosquito bites could seem laughable, but Ray manages to conjure an aura of madness and bone-deep dread around even the scenarios silliest bits of melodrama, evocatively using the extra screen space afforded by CinemaScope to film the Averys cavernous, dimly lit suburban home as if it were a tomb and Ed the ghoul haunting it. (CW)

95 min 20th Century-Fox 35mm from Criterion Pictures USA

Masks are encouraged for all visitors at the Music Box Theatre whenever interacting with staff or not seated in the auditorium. Please read their COVID guidelines before purchasing tickets.