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Nietzsche's reason in madness, Nicholas Ray locates it in suburban Dullsville. The teacher (James Mason) enters with a pain in the neck, his double life as a taxi dispatcher is introduced with a dissolve from the cool blues of a passing bus to the gaudy yellows of a screenful of cabs. The pangs of conformity accumulate and soon he's Hollow Man before an X-ray screen, inflamed arteries are the official diagnosis and cortisone is the cure, "a whole new vista suddenly opened up." Euphoric, ravenous, paranoid, tyrannical, he drags the missus (Barbara Rush) to the fancy store they can't afford and starves his young son (Christopher Olsen) with math problems. The purple bottle behind the cracked mirror, father's little helper. "I'm the healthy type now!" Between pain and mania, a grand and harrowing scald of the Fifties. The Everyman pretending to be at peace with mediocrity uncorks the magic potion and overdoses, "back to the real fundamentals," at the PTA meeting he grins with cigarette smoke and reactionary grandiosity. (A fellow parent is tickled: "That man ought to be the principal of this school.") Ray's charged, detailed images repay close study, his domestic interiors in particular—maps and travel posters on the walls, the pigskin on the fireplace, the rusty water heater not quite concealed in the kitchen. Freed in his own mind, the "male schoolmarm" towers against CinemaScope horizontals until he casts a Nosferatu shadow. Precarious normalcy is lined with medical bills, a glass of milk is enough to crack the familial tableau, up and down the staircase until it splinters. A vision of Abraham wielding scissors is the protagonist's correction of the Old Testament, it dissipates with the Lincoln dream under a red light bulb. Fassbinder pushes it one way (Fear of Fear), Kubrick pushes it another (The Shining). Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald. With Walter Matthau, Robert Simon, Roland Winters, Rusty Lane, and Rachel Stephens.
--- Fernando F. Croce |