Bigger Than Life

Nicholas Ray - 1956
Ray's style is not overexplicit, but there is a quiet mastery here. The 'Scope cuts down the editing decisions, and allows some more room colex and segmented images.
Ray is ultimately a musician, a poet of rythm. He deals in harmonies, dynamics, paces within takes and in the edit. There are punctuation devices; specific cuts and framings, some colour schemes used that are clearly non-realistic (or odd justifications) lighting decisions. There is also a judicious (not overdone) use of more aggressive tracks and framings.
In this film Mason's Nietzschean turn details modern suburban man's turn to insanity. Capitalism, and bourgeois condition, is shown to tend towards both death and this madness. This is reall 'Death Of A Salesman'; but less overly keening and bathetic.
There is a clear move to fascism in Mason, yet at once some of what he says is entriely correct, steamrollering over bourgeois complacency (i.e. dullness, mediocrity).
Ray obviously is not a conservative, but he is trying to defend progressive goals that have been reached. He is not anti-anti-suburbia, the usual life is shown as idiotic, the suburban home a hellhole, but Mason's laternative is certainlty vile. This seems like a more general condemnation of how that culture tends, what it does to you.
The American Dream, bible-quoting and freedom, is suggested to point towards fascism ('I was walking with Abraham Lincoln...'). I look forward to comparing with Fuller, Sirk and Preminger, understabding how 1950's Hollywood could make films as remarkable as this.