Director Nicholas Ray combined emotional intensity and yearning with fierce critiques of American culture. The rarely seen, underrated Bigger Than Life, made a year after Ray directed Rebel without a Cause, is a strange, unsettling vision of conformity and transformation.

James Mason plays Ed Avery, a small-town, '50s schoolteacher working two jobs and suffering debilitating illness who finds a cure - a new experimental wonder drug that seems to take away his pain and appears to free him from the constraints that have held him back. But it also tips him over the edge, turning him from a meek, accommodating figure into a monster of excess and will.

Ray, who adapted the film - with help from Gavin Lambert and Clifford Odets - from a New Yorker feature about drug addiction, goes beyond the expose of a dangerous practice. It seems to suggest that the treatment didn't so much destroy Avery as clarify his aspirations and desires, and the aspirations and desires of his milieu. Rather than abandoning conformity, as he thinks he is doing, he is embracing another version of it.