Bigger Than Life, acclaimed by many critics as Nicholas Ray's best film, also features James Mason in one of his finest performances. 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 lest he grow up to be a criminal. Ray's use of cinemascope photography to frame this intense, close-in psychological drama is even more remarkable than in Rebel Without a Cause; what emerges is a powerful and many-layered vision of the pressures of middle-class life turning its uncomprehending victims into monsters.