The dark at the top, and at the bottom, of the stairs, or, there's always "Bigger Than Life"

Nicholas Ray and James Mason,Bigger Than Life, Ray, 1956

Two films of 1956 seem to turn one of the pre­dom­in­ant genres of the Eisenhower era on its head. In cer­tain very spe­cif­ic senses, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life and Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow are melo­dra­mas. Ray’s film, writ­ten by Cyril Hume and future James Bond scen­ar­ist Richard Maibaum, from a true-life chron­icle by Berton Roueché first pub­lished in The New Yorker, is the more flor­id, fant­ast­ic­al one, very close, in cer­tain respects, to a widescreen, col­or film noir, but this story of addic­tion and mega­lo­mania is still a melo­drama. Tomorrow, being a tale of impossible and unre­quited love, has a more con­ven­tion­al fit into the genre. What’s dif­fer­ent in both is that the main sub­jects are male, not female; neither of these are what the gen­re’s detract­ors could call “women’s pictures.”

In Life, James Mason’s Ed Avery, decent teach­er, hus­band, and fath­er, is pre­scribed cortisone to treat a poten­tially fatal med­ic­al con­di­tion. Overusing the drug, he goes mad, re-inventing him­self as a reac­tion­ary mar­tin­et and finally as a mur­der­ous prim­or­di­al pat­ri­arch in the mold of, he believes, Abraham. In Tomorrow (writ­ten by Bernard C. Schoenfeld from a story by Ursula Parrot), a suc­cess­ful toy man­u­fac­turer (Fred MacMurray), taken crassly for gran­ted by his petty, selfish family—a wife (Joan Bennett) and three kids at vari­ous stages of devel­op­ment­al awfulness—finds his zest for life renewed by an ini­tially entirely inno­cent encounter with an old flame (Barbara Stanwyck); his fam­ily’s sus­pi­cions of his revived friend­ship with the woman engender such resent­ment as to push him deep­er into the rela­tion­ship and very close to a rejec­tion of home and hearth. 

There are very few things that bore me to more tears than lit­er­ary or cine­mat­ic con­dem­na­tions of sub­ur­bia as soul-crushing hell­hole of con­form­ity. But Sirk and Ray were both smart enough artists, smart enough men, to under­stand that con­form­ity and banal­ity can blos­som in any social milieu, even that of the putat­ively clev­er and class­less and free. Conditions are states of mind, and each film has a very par­tic­u­lar way of depict­ing what “home” becomes for each of its fam­il­ies, and their heads. What each artist shows is so acutely spe­cif­ic as to com­pletely sidestep the stand­ard facile suburb-critique.

One lovely thing about the depic­tion of the Avery home in Bigger Than Life (pho­to­graphed by the spec­tac­u­larly under­rated Joe MacDonald) is how its prox­im­ity to Expressionism is really only a heightened real­ism. I grew up in a sub­urb­an house of ’50s vin­tage, and I recall how a single lamp in my bed­room could cast such long shad­ows. Hence, the sin­is­ter scene of the now dic­tat­ori­al Ed “coach­ing” son Richie (Christopher Olsen) with his home­work is both hugely creepy and not alto­geth­er far-fetched in its depiction.

There’s Always Tomorrow was shot by the great Russell Metty, a fre­quent Sirk col­lab­or­at­or, in a tight­er 1.85:1 fram­ing. The way the cam­era moves as the fam­ily mem­bers crowd each oth­er out is mar­velously flu­id. Both films are remark­ably tight in con­struc­tion, with not a gra­tu­it­ous scene or even shot. Aside with their shared con­cern with male char­ac­ters, anoth­er affin­ity  I’m par­tic­u­larly taken with is in where both film situ­ate the locus of the fam­ily sick­ness: the stair­case of the sub­urb­an home. 

In Bigger Than Life the stair­case grows dark­er as the film inex­or­ably pro­ceeds to its post-Sunday-sermon mad scene, one of the greatest set pieces in all of cinema, cli­max­ing with Mason/Avery’s hor­rif­ic pro­nounce­ment “God was wrong!” And all along this center­piece of the house has func­tioned as a character…

In There’s Always Tomorrow the stair­case func­tions for the most part as the bor­der of a sta­ging area, or a launch­ing pad for depar­tures from the house, or a second proscenium.

Until the very end, wherein the cam­era pulls back from this shot (which occurs not too long after the above shot fea­tur­ing the fam­ily por­trait from which MacMurray’s fig­ure is absent:):

And as the cam­era pulls back from MacMurray’s char­ac­ter, who’s clearly hold­ing in his con­tempt for his sniv­el­ling, con­niv­ing chil­dren (from left, Gigi Perreau, William Reynolds, and Judy Nugent), we see Metty’s been shoot­ing from behind the stair­case­’s long dow­els, which now form the bars of MacMurray’s pris­on, as it were. 

Bigger Than Life comes out on DVD and Blu-ray on March 23, in spec­tac­u­lar edi­tions from The Criterion Collection. There’s Always Tomorrow was recently released in a won­der­ful ver­sion from the U.K. out­fit Eureka!/Masters of Cinema; a domest­ic edi­tion of the pic­ture is soon to come from Universal, part of a Barabara Stanwyck col­lec­tion that also includes Sirk’s All I Desire.