It’s All-Star Week at BCB After Dark: the hippest hangout for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in out of the heat. Your name is on the guest list. The dress code is casual. We’ve still got a few tables available. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged
to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you if you thought the Cubs should prioritize pitching in the draft. Well, 53 percent of you got your wish as the Cubs took pitchers with 16 out of their 21 picks.
Here’s the part with the music and the movies. You can skip ahead if you want. Or you can enjoy the culture and skip the baseball stuff if you want. Or just take it all in.
Tonight we’re featuring the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1962 on the “Jazz Casual,” show on NET (the predecessor to PBS). This is complete half-hour program featuring four songs—“The Golden Striker,”“If I Were Eve,”“Winter Tale” and “Lonely Woman.” There’s also a conversation with Lewis in this video.
The MJQ were John Lewis on piano, Milt Jackson on vibes, Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay on drums.
Bigger Than Life is a 1956 melodrama directed by Nicholas Ray and starring and produced by James Mason. The film was a box-office disappointment when it came out and was met with poor reviews. However, a few years later, some of the French New Wave directors praised it and rehabilitated its reputation a decade later.
To put it frankly, Bigger Than Life is just plain nuts. I still haven’t decided if it’s nuts in a good way or nuts in a bad way. I suppose that means it must lean towards the good because if a film makes me think about it for more than ten minutes afterwards, I would argue that it did its job.
Mason stars in Bigger Than Life as Ed Avery, a hardworking schoolteacher who is struggling to keep up his middle-class lifestyle. He’s married to a loving wife Lou (Barbara Rush) and he has a son Richie (Christopher Olsen) who is played with all the annoying traits of a kid on screen in the 1950s. Other than the fact that Ed has to take shifts as a cab driver to make ends meet (a fact that he keeps from his suspicious wife), this is the same setup we see in dozens of television shows of the era.
However, there’s something medically wrong with Ed. He keeps collapsing, a condition he blames on overwork. But once he does it in front of his wife, he’s rushed to the hospital by his gym teacher best friend Wally (Walter Matthau) where he’s diagnosed with a rare disease. Ed has an inflammation of the arteries, which was a deadly disease in the 1950s. He’s given less than a year to live.
However, Ed is lucky as a new drug, cortisone, has recently been approved to treat inflammation. They’re going to prescribe it and hope for a miracle.
Needless to say since you probably know what cortisone is, the drug works. Ed is going to live, although he’s going to have to keep taking cortisone the rest of his life to keep the condition at bay.
In what today would be a major piece of medical malpractice (and maybe it was in 1956 as well), the doctors do not warn Ed that cortisone has side effects. In this case, Ed starts to develop deep anxiety and depression. At first he starts making a bunch of extravagant purchases that he can’t afford, which is common behavior for someone who just cheated death. But the symptoms grow out of control after Ed starts abusing the cortisol, taking a far higher dose than he should. Like any addict, he lies to his doctor to get more and even ends up forging prescriptions. His mental health issues soon turns into dramatic mood swings, paranoia and eventually megalomania. He becomes increasingly controlling and abusive of his family. He goes on a rant at a PTA meeting, telling the parents how awful their kids are, calling them “gorillas.” Ed becomes a tyrant to his child. By the end of the picture, he begins to see himself as the biblical Abraham and I hope you know what God commanded Abraham to do. Ed even shouts “God was wrong!” when Lou points out that God eventually told Abraham to spare his son. That’s about as transgressive as a 1950s American film could get towards religion.
The first third of Bigger Than Life is a fairly dull portrait of middle-class strivers in Eisenhower’s America. Once Ed starts to get addicted to the cortisone, Mason puts on a performance worthy of the great Shakespearean actor. Mason is completely unhinged by the end of the film, but not in a wild, Nicholas Cage way. Mason portrays Ed as insane not through yelling and large gestures but through his face and the way he can deliver crazy talk in his clipped, upper-class English accent. (Left unsaid as to how someone who was a high school football player in the US would talk like that, but audiences didn’t care as much about that back then.)
In one sense, Ray and Mason approach this film as a sympathetic look at mental illness and addiction. After all, it wasn’t Ed’s fault that he was acting like this. But in another sense, it mimics Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause which also looks underneath the seemingly idyllic 1950s American family and rips it apart, portraying it as a breeding ground for all kinds of deep-seeded psychosis. But instead of teenagers, Bigger Than Life portrays the problems of mostly the father and breadwinner and what is demanded out of him in this middle-class suburban life.
Bigger Than Life somewhat reminds me of television shows from the seventies and eighties like Lou Grant or Quincy M.D. that take a contemporary issue and blows it up out of proportion. Certainly Ray doesn’t just turn the mental health side effects of cortisone up to 11, he dials the whole thing up to about 18. But Ray isn’t really interested in side effects of cortisone and in fact, he came to regret naming the drug. What he really wanted to focus on was mental health and the dark underbelly of the American family. Taking on the the callous malpractice of the medical profession was just an added bonus. Ray also wants to take a shot at the reactionary politics of the time, as much of Ed’s insane rantings go back to things like discipline, morality, order and the inherent dark nature of humanity. French New Wave director François Truffaut went so far as to call Ed’s transformation “fascist,” which can be seen as a commentary of how quickly someone can go from a normal, kind man to falling in with a dark ideology.
Ray shot Bigger Than Life in the widescreen CinemaScope, a format more in line with epics like A Bridge on the River Kwai. Doing so certainly places the suburban home more front and center and Ray shoots it like John Ford would shoot the setting sun. Ray tries, with middling success, to blow up this small family drama into a Shakespearian epic. The film does look good, however.
Mason’s unhinged performance is what makes Bigger Than Life. Rush and Matthau also do well in supporting role as people who love Mason’s character but are frightened by what he’s becoming. In that way, the film is one of the first to look how addicts affect the lives of those around them. I do think Rush and Matthau’s characters should have caught on with what was wrong with Ed much earlier. Maybe 1950s faith in medicine, a lack of knowledge of side effects and the shame of mental illness kept them quiet for too long, but Masons’ transformation is so great that they’d have to intervene earlier. Still, when they do step in, the results are explosive.
The downside of Bigger Than Life is that the first third of the film is quite dull and Mason’s performance is so over-the-top you either roll with it and love it or you reject it as overwrought and unrealistic. It does make a terrific double-feature with Rebel Without A Cause, however.
Here’s the trailer for Bigger Than Life.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
Tonight was the Home Run Derby and for the first time in many years, I didn’t watch any of it. The reason for that is that it was on Netflix, and I canceled my Netflix subscription a few years ago as I found less and less of their programming appealing to me and the stuff that I did like tended to get canceled quickly. This is a big reason that Netflix has been grabbing exclusive rights to various high-profile sporting events—to keep people like me who aren’t fans of their regular programming from canceling. Obviously in my case, it didn’t work.
Netflix isn’t the only streaming service trying to grab sports to add subscriptions as traditional linear cable falls apart. But in fact, Netflix has far fewer sports than a lot of other streaming services. But that makes putting something like the Home Run Derby on it an even worse proposition for fans. For baseball fans, it might be worth a cheaper Peacock subscription that has Sunday Night games as well as several basketball and college football games. For a baseball fan, a Netflix subscription only gets you Opening Day games and the Home Run Derby. It does have a few other sports like one NFL game and some combat sports, but otherwise there isn’t much there for the sports fan.
So as I said, tonight is the first night in a long time that I won’t watch any of the Home Run Derby. But to be clear, when I say I traditionally “watch” the Home Run Derby, I mean that I have it on in my house while I do some other things. I also traditionally miss the first half of it to deal with other things I have to do on Mondays. I have watched the Home Run Derby in the past simply because it was the only baseball on the Monday night before the All-Star Game. Were there some other good baseball game or sporting event on at the same time, I’d probably watch that instead. My level of interest in the Home Run Derby is low and I mostly watched it out of habit and a lack of anything else.
So tonight, I’m going to give you a chance to sound off on MLB’s decision to put the Home Run Derby on Netflix. Do you have Netflix and did you watch it? Do you subscribe to Netflix for other things but don’t care about it. Would you have watched if it were available but it wasn’t worth subscribing to Netflix for a month to see it? Or are you just good giving it a miss altogether?
Forgive the poor way these answers are worded. The “Feed” polls are very limited in the number of characters I can use. I’m currently looking for some other options for polls.
Thank you for stopping by tonight. We’re always glad to see you stop by. Please get home safely. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow evening for more BCB After Dark.
