SICK, SICK, SICK!
BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) The quintessential "anti-cortisone" flick! Hard-working schoolteacher Ed Avery (JAMES MASON) is prescribed the infamous "miracle cure" anti-inflammatory drug (actually an adrenal hormone), still in its early days of clinical use, to arrest the effects of a possibly terminal inflammation of his arteries. His health is restored, but its effects on his behaviour threaten his family. Little by little, to escape crises of depression, Ed increases the dosage. He feels as if he has been born again with a clearness which makes him superior to others. He then goes about reforming teaching, the education of his son, home life, television, the church... He becomes increasingly odious to his son, Richie, & with his wife, Lou, whom he regards as lower beings. He tyrannizes Richie, wanting to make a prodigy out of him. Increasingly megalomaniacal, he becomes wary of everyone & treats his friends with hardness. Thematically, the positive aspects of middle class family life are pitted against problems - the constricting limitations of milieu & values amplified by the effects of the drug. Producer: JAMES MASON. Prod Co./Dist: Twentieth Century Fox. Director: NICHOLAS RAY. Music: DAVID RAKSIN. Cast: JAMES MASON, Barbara Rush, WALTER MATTHAU, Christopher Olsen, JERRY (LEAVE IT TO BEAVER) MATHERS (uncredited). Based on an article in The New Yorker by Berton Roueche. This is a 'flat print' of a cinemascope production. 95 mins. NFVLS.
THE DOCTOR'S SECRET (1910)
Lively trick film by Georges Melies in which a sickly overweight patient is passed through a variety of weird machines, is dismembered & reassembled as a healthy thin person. Producer, director: Georges Melies. 8 mins. NFVLS.
GOODBYE MR. GERM (1940)
Between lensing KARLOFF/LUGOSI monsterpieces, such as THE BLACK CAT (1934), & scaling the further heights of "B" film-making with DETOUR (1945), THE MAN FROM PLANET X (1951) et c., EDGAR G. ULMER helmed a number of poverty row film commissions. This is one from his East Coast stint in the early 1940s... At the suggestion of his daughter, a cheerfully deranged medical researcher constructs a "Germ Radio" in his laboratory/menagerie, &, together with his friend, "Mr. Tee Bee", they discuss tuberculosis & itstreatment. - More of a hallucination than an actual film. Prod Co: De Frenes Studios. Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer. 14 mins. CAC.
THE PILL (1980)
An unexpected drug side-effect can ruin your day, not to mention your world. Director: Zeljko Nemec. 1 min. CAC
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