One of Nick Ray's least known films is also acclaimed by many critics as his best. It features James Mason (who also produced the film) in one of his finest performances. Just as Ray's portrait of Hollywood in In a Lonely Place was the antithesis of glamor, its small, sunny bungalows like burrows of sadness, his picture of American family life is uncompromisingly bleak. The discombobulation of apron-clad Jim Backus as seen by his teenage son in Rebel Without a Cause is as nothing compared to the compounded confusions of James Mason in Bigger Than Life. He portrays a small-town schoolteacher who moonlights as a taxi-cab driver to supplement his salary. When he begins taking cortisone to ward off the crippling effects of arthritis, his personality takes on a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. As he becomes increasingly deranged and ineffectual as a husband and father, his sense of failure plays off against delusions of grandeur; he devises grandiose schemes, including one Biblically-inspired plot to sacrifice his young son. Ray's use of CinemaScope photography to frame this intense, close-in psychological drama is even more remarkable than in Rebel; what emerges is a powerful and many-layered vision of the pressures of middle-class life turning its uncomprehending victims into monsters.