Bigger Than Life,acclaimed by many critics as Nicholas Ray's best film, also featuresJames Mason in one of his finest performances. He portrays a small-townschoolteacher who moonlights as a taxi-cab driver to supplement hissalary. When he begins taking cortisone to ward off the cripplingeffects of arthritis, his personality takes on a Jekyll-and-Hydetransformation. As he becomes increasingly deranged and ineffectual as ahusband and father, his sense of failure plays off against delusions ofgrandeur; he devises grandiose schemes, including onebiblically-inspired plot to sacrifice his young son lest he grow up tobe a criminal. Ray's use of cinemascope photography to frame thisintense, close-in psychological drama is even more remarkable than inRebel Without a Cause; what emerges is a powerful and many-layeredvision of the pressures of middle-class life turning its uncomprehendingvictims into monsters.

• Directed by Nicholas Ray.Written by Cyril Hume and Richard Malbaum, based on a New Yorker articleby Berton Roueche. Photographed by Joe MacDonald. With James Mason,Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau. (1956, 95 mins, 35mm, 'Scope, Color, Vaultprint from Twentieth Century Fox Studios with permission of Films Inc.)