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Long after Technirama and Superscope were consigned to history books, the anamorphic widescreen process developed at 20th Century-Fox and branded as CinemaScope still remains synonymous for most cinephiles with cinematic grandeur. The first years of CinemaScope were overwhelmingly flush with biblical epics, Westerns, and other genre films heavy on visual splendor, but the format’s early days also saw maverick directors like Vincente Minnelli and Henri-Georges Clouzot using the extra-wide canvas for projects far more personal and idiosyncratic than King Richard and the Crusaders. An adaptation of a New Yorker article about cortisone-induced psychosis, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, maybe more than any other film the era produced, seems an especially strange candidate for CinemaScope, but then again pretty much everything about Bigger Than Life seems strange. James Mason stars as Ed Avery, a suburban school teacher trying to keep up a facade of domestic cheeriness until he’s stricken with a painful and deadly vascular disease. Faced with only months to live, Ed begins a new experimental hormone treatment at his doctors’ behest and finds himself miraculously cured with a new lease on life. Something’s off about this new Ed, though, and his family and friends (including Walter Matthau in an early role as Ed’s best friend, Wally the gym teacher) start to worry when his behavior grows more aggressive and erratic with each fistful of medication he gobbles. In other hands, a film about a father driven to infanticide by the stuff you put on mosquito bites could seem laughable, but Ray manages to conjure an aura of madness and bone-deep dread around even the scenario’s silliest bits of melodrama, evocatively using the extra screen space afforded by CinemaScope to film the Averys’ cavernous, dimly lit suburban home as if it were a tomb and Ed the ghoul haunting it. | 35mm from Criterion Pictures USA

Preceded by: TBA