Bigger Than Life

“The story of the handful of hope that became a fistful of hell!”

Ed Avery (James Mason), a schoolteacher and devoted father in the suburbs, is handed a new drug called cortisone to treat a painful illness. Nicholas Ray films his family's tidy house and the evenings with his wife Lou (Barbara Rush) and son Richie as the pills begin to take hold. Ed starts out grateful and cheerful, and nobody around him yet knows what he will demand of them.