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Producer James Mason tells the story of a public schoolteacher (acted by Mason himself) stricken with a rare and almost always fatal arterial disease. Only the wonder drug cortisone relieves his excruciating pain and prospect of imminent death. As implied by the movie, Mason becomes addicted to this nonhabit-form-ing drug (medical nonsense) and proceeds to go insane on overdosages (medical anomaly). But good old ly-hydroxy-n-dehydrocorticosterone is what keeps him alive and feeling ten feet tall, so he gobbles the stuff with ever more recklessness. At home and school, before the incredulous eyes of his wife, son and fellow teachers, Cortisone Fiend Mason roller-coasters over the peaks and down into the abysses of a drug-induced manic-depressive psychosis. One moment he weeps to bemoan his abject nothingness, the next he declares himself a genius destined to revolutionize the world's philosophy of education. When the P.T.A. fails to acclaim his self-styled greatness, Mason decides to make his own son his first guinea pig. But the boy does not respond well to overdosages of football and arithmetic, and Mason gets to thinking of the Biblical Abraham, decides the only thing to do is to offer the hapless boy to God as a human sacrifice. Mason's terror-numbed wife protests that God forbade Abraham to kill his son; Madman Mason brandishes a scissors, loftily replies: "God was wrong."
The men in white are usually sacrosanct heroes to Hollywood. But Bigger makes most of its doctors a Latin-spouting pack of hoddy-doddies not much brighter than Congo witch doctors. Not until Mason turns murderous do they at last hit on the shrewd deduction that he is suffering a mental upset from too much cortisone.
As movies go, Bigger Than Life is a first-rate thriller, like a peep show seen in a padded cell. It is superbly acted by Mason, hair-raisingly directed by Nicholas Ray. But medically, its greatest blunder is in casting cortisone as an intrinsically monstrous villain — with only a perfunc tory bow to the truth that Mason has gone haywire on too many of a good pill.
Snorted one medical critic: "They could have made a movie about a man drinking himself to death on too many gallons of plain water — that's possible too."