Bigger Than Life (1956)

Based on an article in the New Yorker, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life stars James Mason (who also produced the film) as elementary school teacher Ed Avery. A thoughtful, gentle, educated man, with a loving wife, Lou (Barbara Rush), and a young son, Richie (Christopher Olsen), who loves him, Avery is also successful in his work, respected by his principal and colleagues, and well liked in his community. But he is also over-extended in his pursuit of the American dream -- he secretly works a second… Show more job to earn extra money, and, much more seriously, doesn't dare break stride, despite the increasingly painful physical spasms that he suffers. He finally collapses one day, and after an extended series of tests the doctors inform him that he is suffering from a serious arterial disease. His doctors (Robert F. Simon, Roland Winters, Lewis Charles) tell him that he may well have less than a year to live, but also offer him one possible hope, with treatment using cortisone, which was then a new, not fully tested drug. Avery jumps at the chance and makes a gradual but seemingly full recovery. He returns to work a few weeks later, but it soon becomes clear that he's not the same -- the first sign of a problem is his new, cavalier attitude toward money, and then Lou becomes alarmed over his expressions of rage over seemingly insignificant annoyances and slights. And then he starts expressing himself in grand, exalted terms, first to Lou and then to his colleagues at school, including his closest friend, Wally Gibbs (Walter Matthau); he couples this with a belittling attitude toward the students and, worse yet, their parents, and the goals of the school and of education in general. Avery's job is now in jeopardy, which is the only reason Lou and Wally keep quiet, lest they make matters in the Avery home worse than they already are. But matters only get worse when Wally determines that it is the cortisone -- which Ed has been taking in far greater doses than prescribed -- that is

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