The dark at the top, and at the bottom, of the stairs, or, there's always "Bigger Than Life"

Nicholas Ray and James Mason,Bigger Than Life, Ray, 1956

Two films of 1956 seem to turn one of the predominant genres of the Eisenhower era on its head. In certain very specific senses, Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life and Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow are melodramas. Ray's film, written by Cyril Hume and future James Bond scenarist Richard Maibaum, from a true-life chronicle by Berton Roueché first published in The New Yorker, is the more florid, fantastical one, very close, in certain respects, to a widescreen, color film noir, but this story of addiction and megalomania is still a melodrama. Tomorrow, being a tale of impossible and unrequited love, has a more conventional fit into the genre. What's different in both is that the main subjects are male, not female; neither of these are what the genre's detractors could call "women's pictures."

In Life, James Mason's Ed Avery, decent teacher, husband, and father, is prescribed cortisone to treat a potentially fatal medical condition. Overusing the drug, he goes mad, re-inventing himself as a reactionary martinet and finally as a murderous primordial patriarch in the mold of, he believes, Abraham. In Tomorrow (written by Bernard C. Schoenfeld from a story by Ursula Parrot), a successful toy manufacturer (Fred MacMurray), taken crassly for granted by his petty, selfish family—a wife (Joan Bennett) and three kids at various stages of developmental awfulness—finds his zest for life renewed by an initially entirely innocent encounter with an old flame (Barbara Stanwyck); his family's suspicions of his revived friendship with the woman engender such resentment as to push him deeper into the relationship and very close to a rejection of home and hearth. 

There are very few things that bore me to more tears than literary or cinematic condemnations of suburbia as soul-crushing hellhole of conformity. But Sirk and Ray were both smart enough artists, smart enough men, to understand that conformity and banality can blossom in any social milieu, even that of the putatively clever and classless and free. Conditions are states of mind, and each film has a very particular way of depicting what "home" becomes for each of its families, and their heads. What each artist shows is so acutely specific as to completely sidestep the standard facile suburb-critique.

One lovely thing about the depiction of the Avery home in Bigger Than Life (photographed by the spectacularly underrated Joe MacDonald) is how its proximity to Expressionism is really only a heightened realism. I grew up in a suburban house of '50s vintage, and I recall how a single lamp in my bedroom could cast such long shadows. Hence, the sinister scene of the now dictatorial Ed "coaching" son Richie (Christopher Olsen) with his homework is both hugely creepy and not altogether far-fetched in its depiction.


There's Always Tomorrow was shot by the great Russell Metty, a frequent Sirk collaborator, in a tighter 1.85:1 framing. The way the camera moves as the family members crowd each other out is marvelously fluid. Both films are remarkably tight in construction, with not a gratuitous scene or even shot. Aside with their shared concern with male characters, another affinity  I'm particularly taken with is in where both film situate the locus of the family sickness: the staircase of the suburban home. 

In Bigger Than Life the staircase grows darker as the film inexorably proceeds to its post-Sunday-sermon mad scene, one of the greatest set pieces in all of cinema, climaxing with Mason/Avery's horrific pronouncement "God was wrong!" And all along this centerpiece of the house has functioned as a character...


In There's Always Tomorrow the staircase functions for the most part as the border of a staging area, or a launching pad for departures from the house, or a second proscenium.




Until the very end, wherein the camera pulls back from this shot (which occurs not too long after the above shot featuring the family portrait from which MacMurray's figure is absent:):


And as the camera pulls back from MacMurray's character, who's clearly holding in his contempt for his snivelling, conniving children (from left, Gigi Perreau, William Reynolds, and Judy Nugent), we see Metty's been shooting from behind the staircase's long dowels, which now form the bars of MacMurray's prison, as it were. 

Bigger Than Life comes out on DVD and Blu-ray on March 23, in spectacular editions from The Criterion Collection. There's Always Tomorrow was recently released in a wonderful version from the U.K. outfit Eureka!/Masters of Cinema; a domestic edition of the picture is soon to come from Universal, part of a Barabara Stanwyck collection that also includes Sirk's All I Desire. 

Comments

[Giles Edwards]

I retract the earlier erroneous "minor" comment even further having watched the MoC disc *again* for the second time in a week or so. Wonderfully ruminative and exhaustively analytical essay regarding the spacial geography of the blocking (of which Sirk was such a master) in relation to familial psychology in the TOMORROW disc as well.

It does lack a bawdy THEY LIVE-esque fistfight that so memorably caps BIGGER THAH LIFE, though.

[Goodvibe61]

You are truly on a Douglas Sirk roll these days Glenn. And I must admit you've really piqued my curiosity, as I've only seen a couple of his films, and those were awhile back. I'm gonna go over to Netflix and put everything they have into my queue. Can you tell me: of what they DON'T have over there, what should I seek out?

[C. Jerry Kutner]

Cyril Hume not only wrote BIGGER THAN LIFE (with a little help from producer James Mason, among others) but also FORBIDDEN PLANET (with a little help from Shakespeare). Was he really as talented as those two films suggest?

The prototype of the middle-class-home-as-trap film, also featuring a staircase, might be Ophuls' great THE RECKLESS MOMENT.

[Asher Steinberg]

"What each artist shows is so acutely specific as to completely sidestep the standard facile suburb-critique."

Sure - although I don't know that I've ever seen any film from the 50s that one could label a facile suburb-critique (perhaps the bad ones are forgotten?) the way you can with Little Children, American Beauty, Rev. Road, Pleasantville, etc. That said, There's Always Tomorrow played for me like a pretty inferior rethink of The Reckless Moment. Compare, for example, the endings. They're the same story, really - Stanwyck leaves MacMurray to his spouse, Mason leaves Bennett to hers, the kids clasp their hands in joy that their parents' threatened marriages are safe - but Ophuls's is heartbreaking, while Sirk's is just snide. Everything in the Ophuls film is more nuanced, while in There's Always Tomorrow you have the Failed Marriage and the Evil Kids who prevent their Poor Henpecked Father from running off with his True Love. There's very little empathy on Sirk's part for the kids, whose reaction to their father's apparent infidelity, after all, isn't exactly ununderstandable. And the photography, while gorgeous, at times is a bit of a distraction (I feel the same way about a lot of James Wong Howe's work), and only adds to the morally overdetermined quality of the film. Even the beginning ("one day in Sunny California," reads the title card - cut to a rainy day in California) is much too cut-and-dry, and really not so far in spirit from a lot of the suburbphobic dreck we've been subjected to the last ten years. Same goes for the overt "Fred MacMurray is a broken robot" symbolism.

[Glenn Kenny]

As fond as I am of "The Reckless Moment," which I consider a sublime masterpiece, I'm rather disinclined to use it as a cudgel with which to beat "There's Always Tomorrow." Pace Asher Steinberg, but I think the two are very different films. It isn't just the thriller element of "Moment" that sets it apart; it's also the fact that it's a kind of dual redemption narrative. Bennett gets her marriage back, Mason saves his own soul. Bennett's character isn't so much dissatisfied with her marriage as she is with its circumstances. In "Tomorrow" no one is redeemed; it's a darker vision overall. Here, the viewers' sympathies are (deliberately) shaken up a good deal more; while one feels for MacMurray's character, one also, at the beginning, sees him rather petulantly in denial of his patriarchal duties, as it were. The reason Sirk doesn't show much empathy for the kids, is, frankly, because they're self-involved jerks who treat their father with abject indifference until the point when they suspect him of wrongdoing, as which point they pounce with even more petulance than MacMurray showed when he didn't get to take the wife out for their anniversary. It's true that both film's could bear the motto "No one is innocent," but that's hardly what you'd call an uncommon thematic statement.