"If you need proof of Godard's assertion that 'the cinema is Nicholas Ray,' it's all here, in every claustrophobic close-up and looming low-angle shot. (The) director at his expressionistic best, subverting the suburban fantasy and leaving nothing but tattered gray flannel and scorched earth in his wake."
– David Fear, Time Out New York

"A REVIVAL NOT TO BE MISSED! A REVELATORY NEW PRINT!
One of the greatest views of the hidden fractures of family life; James Mason disturbingly combines intellect, sensibility, and rage."
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Click here to read the Critic's Notebook on Bigger Than Life • Click here to read Richard Brody's exclusive online review

“ONE OF THE BEST, MOST RADICAL, LEAST-KNOWN AMERICAN FILMS OF THE 1950s. A canny retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde story...
a series of immaculate hedgerows, picket fences, and modern kitchen appliances transforms into a dystopian, surrealist expanse—
an obvious precursor to David Lynch; Father Knows Best reconfigured as Greek tragedy. STILL-TERRIFYING!”
– Scott Foundas, The Village Voice
Click here to read the full review

"FILM OF THE WEEK! Nearly everything onscreen, from the crisp gowns and boxy suits
to the suburban setting and saturated Technicolor, forms a slick and almost eerie portrait of an era."
– New York magazine

"Feels closer to a suburban monster movie than to any conventional melodrama from the period. Ray’s intoxicatingly evocative use of CinemaScope’s wide screen gives living rooms and kitchens the epic expanse of a metropolis, which Mason lays waste to the way that Godzilla decimated buildings."
– Cullen Gallagher, The L Magazine
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“A vivid critique, a Nietzschean assault on Rockwellian banality. Showcases Ray’s pioneering use of color,
with hues are just as brilliant as Rebel Without A Cause, as is his knack for the glorious sprawl of CinemaScope. ”
– Artforum
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(1956) “God was wrong!” proclaims James Mason — but then he’s in the grip of all-out 50s mediocrity: a too-intellectual, bow-tied grade school teacher, his house festooned with travel posters for places he’s never been to; forced to spend odd afternoons as a cab dispatcher to make ends meet; his job, friends, family, and even himself, self-described as dull. But then there’s bad news and good news: he’s got a rare arterial disease that will probably finish him within a year. The good news? There’s this miracle drug (cortisone) that might just save his life. But there could be some little side effects… Time capsule of the 50s: the décor, the blocky suits and omnipresent hats for the men, the gowns that wife Barbara Rush tries on during the new Mason’s ill-advised splurge fest, the hat she wears on Sunday, the conformity (everyone in town seems to attend the same church) — an unexpected setting for Mason’s tour de force performance, as he moves from frumpy nice guy to full-blown, drug-induced megalomaniac. Color; Approx. 95 minutes

Godard's MADE IN U.S.A., dedicated "to Nick [Ray] and Samuel [Fuller]," will run at Film Forum, January 9-22.

“There is not a director who films or frames interior shots with Ray’s dynamic, fraught grace. No one made CinemaScope so glorious a shape as Ray, a self-conscious poet of American disenchantment… Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life show how plainly he saw manias building in America.”
– David Thomson

“HAIR-RAISING! One of Ray’s most frightening and affecting pictures, perhaps one of the most disturbing of the 1950s. Every ‘Scope composition becomes an arena for the most primal emotions, leading to a truly shocking climax. A key movie, one of the films that’s meant the most to me over the years.”
– Martin Scorsese

“A POTENT MELODRAMA. DEEPLY DISTURBING… ACHIEVES THE GOTHIC DIMENSIONS OF A HORROR STORY! Ray’s most powerful film, and in some respects his most important. A profoundly upsetting exposure… it’s hard to think of another Hollywood picture with more to say about the sheer awfulness of ‘normal’ American family life during the 50s.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

“BRILLIANT! Ray forges an expressionism with a touch of brooding, atomic-age pandora’s box sci-fi. His direction is so swift, sure, and brutal that, even with the privilege of 50 years’ perspective and irony, the movie remains terrifying.”
– Nicolas Rapold, Reverse Shot
Click here to read the full review

“With an even more all-embracing sense of disenchantment than before, Ray dissects the American Dream and finds it a nightmare. Various levels of plot—Oedipal, allegorical, psychological horror, and Hollywood melodrama—are seamlessly interwoven, so that they enrich each other with a wide, complex, tapestry of allusions.”
– Geoff Andrew

“Under Ray’s masterful direction, James Mason is given three or four of the most beautiful close-ups I have had the chance to see since the advent of CinemaScope. The trenchant direction imposes a terrific pace. Short scenes sweep across the screen, all concerned with Mason’s deterioration. The very opposite of a decorative film, but the slightest detail has an overwhelming beauty. An exceptional story, an excellent portrait of marriage. A film of implacable logic and sanity, Bigger than Life uses both those very qualities as targets, and scores a bull’s-eye in every frame.”
– François Truffaut

Links:

Read the New Yorker article that inspired the movie [pdf file]

A CRITERION PICTURES RELEASE OF A TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM