James Mason, in one of his finest performances, portrays a small-town schoolteacher taking cortisone to ward off the crippling effects of arthritis. His personality takes on a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, his sense of failure playing off against delusions of grandeur. 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.