Last Saturday, as part of “Tales from The New Yorker,” a two-week program at Film Forum that celebrates the magazine’s centenary with movies that have a connection to its writers and their work, I introduced a screening of Nicholas Ray’s 1956 melodrama “Bigger Than Life,” which is based on an Annals of Medicine piece titled “Ten Feet Tall,” by Berton Roueché, in the September 10, 1955, issue. I’ve been somewhat obsessed by this film for decades and have written about it before, but, to prepare my introduction, I read up on its genesis, and this new angle of entry proved revelatory—regarding not just the film but the history of cinema and Ray’s distinctive place in that history. In the backstory of “Bigger Than Life,” the spirit of its cinematic times emerges, and reverberates even to the present day.
Roueché’s article is about a schoolteacher in Queens who falls severely ill with a malady that his doctors struggle to diagnose. While in the hospital, he’s found to have a rare vascular inflammation that’s invariably fatal. But he is given a newly developed medicine—cortisone (and the related substance ACTH)—and recovers, returning home to his wife and young son and resuming work. There is a side effect, however: drug-induced psychosis. The teacher gets delusions of grandeur, behaving tyrannically toward his family. He yields to wild impulses and endures crushing mood swings. His behavior strains his marriage. Eventually, his doctors adjust his treatment so that he can stay both healthy and sane. The movie version is set in an anonymous suburb, and it stars James Mason—who also produced the film—as Ed Avery, the teacher. Barbara Rush co-stars as Ed’s wife, Lou; Christopher Olsen plays their son; and Walter Matthau plays Ed’s gym-teacher colleague.
The project came together while Ray was in Europe, in late 1955, to promote “Rebel Without a Cause,” starring James Dean. Mason found the story and pitched it to Twentieth Century Fox, where he was under contract. After seeing “Rebel,” he chose Ray, also under contract at Fox, to direct, and Ray, reading the story in Paris, was enthusiastic. By the time Ray got back to Hollywood, in January, 1956, a script had already been written by Richard Maibaum, who later made his name writing thirteen James Bond movies, and a former novelist named Cyril Hume. (The making of the film is detailed in a biography of Ray by the French critic Bernard Eisenschitz, from 1990, and another, by Patrick McGilligan, from 2011.)
The director Nicholas Ray and the actor James Dean on the set of “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955).Photograph from Sunset Boulevard / Getty
Ray didn’t like the script; Mason was willing to work with Ray on a revision, but Ray wanted to bring in the playwright Clifford Odets (then also in Hollywood) to redo it. Mason refused this request. But Ray—together with Gavin Lambert, a British writer who was romantically involved with Ray and was hired officially as a dialogue director but who was Ray’s unofficial artistic consultant—consulted Odets nonetheless. Ray had a big problem with the ending, and he snuck Odets onto the set to revise it, on a portable typewriter. According to Mason, three studio executives, getting wind of Odets’s presence, stormed toward the set to prevent Ray from filming what hadn’t been “approved.” Mason, with admirable confidence in his director, headed them off.
The studio did succeed in preventing Ray from changing some parts of the script, but the director had other ways of fixing things, as Lambert writes in his extraordinary memoir, “Mainly About Lindsay Anderson”:
With classic Hollywood, don’t believe the credits: the better the filmmaker, the greater the involvement in the various elements of production. On “Bigger Than Life,” Ray’s sole credit is as director, but he was closely involved in the writing and the editing, and much more besides. He played a key role in the production design, and his use of color is startling, eerie, disruptive. The movie is full of eye-catching colors: high-style dresses that Ed forces Lou to try on; a red jacket (as in “Rebel Without a Cause”) that their son wears; the red edging of Ed’s Bible; above all, a strange little purple bottle of Ed’s medicine. The movie’s lurid hues come off as ominous intrusions, disturbances of the regular order. Ray wasn’t the cinematographer (Joseph MacDonald was), but, under Ray’s direction, the film—shot in the widescreen CinemaScope format—departed significantly from industry norms. Defying professional orthodoxies about keeping widescreen framings wide and widescreen editing simple, Ray relies copiously on closeups, quick montages, and distorting and disorienting diagonal angles.
Ray’s basic problem with the original script, by Maibaum and Hume, was that, sticking close to Roueché’s article, it remained narrowly a tale of medical mystery. As Lambert recalled, Ray “found the relationship between the schoolteacher and his wife very shallow, the medical details presented ‘with shots of test tubes and microscopes straight out of The Story of Louis Pasteur [1936],’ and the ending anticlimactic.” Maibaum complained (in an interview by McGilligan) about the director’s reworking of the film: “Ray exaggerated some scenes and diluted others. Some directors don’t realize that there are scenes that are like music: if you knock out a few notes, it becomes discordant.”
In “Bigger Than Life,” Ray turned a medical mystery into an existential disaster. He treats the drug as something like a truth serum that pushes Ed Avery’s petty discontents to radical extremes, his increasingly deranged ideas expressing things that were latent: his boredom with the people in his milieu and with himself, his disdain for the frivolity of mass culture, his frustration with his job’s bureaucratic routine. Ed’s monstrous behavior under the influence of cortisone shatters the veneer of middle-class gentility to reveal the fault lines repressed beneath it. In his marriage, solicitude becomes control; at school and at home, education becomes despotism. Commonplace virtues turn toward vice: compassion veers toward deceit, attentive parenting toward either laxity or oppressiveness, friendship toward jealousy or contempt, sociability toward falsehood or cruelty. This fraying of all basic bonds leaves everyone—whether in the family, the workplace, the neighborhood, or the social set—irreparably alone. Ray made “Bigger Than Life” not discordant but atonal.
In certain circles, the name of Nicholas Ray is something of a meme, nearly a punch line. Just as Jerry Lewis’s name is almost synonymous with “They love him in France,” Ray’s name is practically a synonym for “auteur.” In the fifties, for the young French critics at the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—who would soon become the French New Wave directors—Ray was more than a hero; he was an exemplar. Writing in 1955, François Truffaut called him “an auteur in our sense of the word,” and Éric Rohmer said that both he and his fellow-critic Jacques Rivette considered Ray to be “the greatest . . . of the new generation of American filmmakers.” In 1957, Jean-Luc Godard wrote, “If the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to,” and, the following year, declared, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.” For his part, Ray was deeply gratified by these young French cinephiles’ love for his films, because, in the United States, he was nearly anonymous, and his unorthodox films were often reviewed harshly. By contrast, as Ray put it, at Cahiers, Arts (where Truffaut wrote), and the British magazine Sight and Sound (which Lambert edited), “The contact was established.”
Yet there was something paradoxical about the Cahiers critics’ fervor for Ray. They had got the nickname the Hitchcocko-Hawksians because the two Hollywood filmmakers for whom they asserted their case most vigorously and insistently were Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. (In 1952, Godard called Hawks “the greatest American artist.”) But those directors, who were born in the eighteen-nineties and started their directorial careers in the nineteen-twenties, were of a different generation than Ray, who was born in 1911, and who didn’t make his first film, “They Live by Night,” until 1948. That was the same year that the young Rivette made his first (albeit D.I.Y.) film; for France’s young critics, Ray seemed almost a contemporary.
Moreover, Hitchcock and Hawks were Hollywood insiders, well regarded in the industry as showmen and craftsmen, albeit not as artists (something they’d never have claimed publicly, though they were). Ray, however, was temperamentally an outsider, not least because he was open about who he was and what kind of ambitions he had. In this regard, too, he was the young French critics’ peer. He self-consciously defined the cinema as art and likened his own work to that of an author, telling the Cahiers critic Charles Bitsch, in 1958, “The camera is an instrument, it’s the microscope that makes it possible to detect the melody of the gaze. It’s a magnificent instrument, because its microscopic power is, for me, the equivalent of a writer’s introspection, and the unspooling of film in the camera represents, in my view, the writer’s stream of thought.” Though he didn’t make this declaration until he was already lionized in France, the attitude it expresses had been on clear display in his work from the start, along with a sense of solitude and alienation, as suggested even by some of his best films’ titles: “In a Lonely Place,” “On Dangerous Ground,” “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Ray told Bitsch that his “personal label” was “I’m a stranger here myself,” which is also a line delivered in Ray’s 1954 Western, “Johnny Guitar,” by Sterling Hayden, who, in the title role, gives the coolest performance in any classic Hollywood movie—except, maybe, for James Dean, in “Rebel.” Ray and Dean had become close friends and formed their own production company, planning to make two movies together in short order; Dean died before they could realize their plans. Ray wanted another king of attitude to star in his next film, “The True Story of Jesse James”: Elvis Presley. (The studio gave him Robert Wagner instead.)
Unlike Hitchcock, Hawks, or any other Hollywood director of the era, Ray was a figure of the counterculture. In the early nineteen-fifties (even the late forties), he was already a person of the sixties—not just before the Beatles but before the Beats. It’s hard to think of anyone who played a similar role so prominently at the time. Despite working in a lucrative and glitzy field, he was essentially a bohemian peer of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Dylan Thomas. Hitchcock and Hawks weren’t outsiders; they cloaked their boldness in bonhomie. And Orson Welles, though younger than Ray, having been born in 1915, nonetheless seemed older, having achieved fame and artistic greatness during the Depression. Ray, although in his forties, was at one with youth in revolt.
What is an auteur? It’s not a director who makes films that look a certain way, not a filmmaker who pursues a set of themes consistently over the course of a career. It’s not a status that can be proved empirically, because the idea of the auteur—of the director as the cinematic counterpart to, and equal of, the writer of a novel—isn’t a theory. It’s an experience, a sense of immediate communication with an artist who’s nowhere on the screen and yet everywhere in the movie. It’s the awareness that there is somebody there, whose movie is in effect a first-person discourse—which is to say, it’s an essentially literary, metaphorical phenomenon, not an empirical one. The analysis of style, form, and content belongs to critics everywhere; but the young Cahiers critics, in conjuring the characters of directors, were watching films not as critics but as the artists that they intended to be and, by temperament, already were. They treated criticism as an artistic activity and then proved its validity with the movies that they went on to make. And the artist they recognized most keenly and embraced most fervently was the one who, of all Hollywood filmmakers, was most like themselves—or like how they wanted to be. To watch movies auteuristically is to watch them like an artist; to deny the primacy of directorial art and ascribe authorship to the system is to watch movies like a suit. ♦
