Bigger Than Life

"Bigger Than Life" (1956) is a Nicholas Ray drama you can watch online on iFILM, drawn from a real case reported in The New Yorker. James Mason produced and stars as Ed Avery, a suburban schoolteacher given cortisone for a terminal arterial condition.

The drug saves his life. Then the dose goes up. The quiet family man his wife and son knew turns grandiose, domineering, convinced of his own total correctness. Barbara Rush and Walter Matthau — playing Ed's wife and close friend — watch the change take hold and find no handle on it. Ray buried a devastating critique of 1950s domesticity inside the packaging of a Hollywood melodrama: the family as something that can be poisoned from the inside, no outside threat required. Stream "Bigger Than Life" online on iFILM.