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Release: March 23, 2010

$7.99

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Product Description Though ignored at the time of its release, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life is now recognized as one of the great American films of the 1950s. When a friendly, successful suburban teacher and father (James Mason, in one of his most indelible roles) is prescribed cortisone for a painful, possibly fatal affliction, he grows dangerously addicted to the experimental drug, resulting in his transformation into a psychotic and ultimately violent household despot. This Eisenhower-era throat-grabber, shot in expressive CinemaScope, is an excoriating take on the nuclear family. That it came in the day of Father Knows Best makes it all the more shocking—and wildly entertaining. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Audio commentary featuring critic Geoff Andrew (The Films of Nicholas Ray) Profile of Nicholas Ray (1977), a half-hour television interview with the director New video appreciation of Bigger Than Life with author Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City) New video interview with Susan Ray, widow of the director and editor of I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies Theatrical trailer English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: A new essay by critic and video maker B. Kite Amazon.com Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life is a great American film long esteemed overseas but little known in its own land. That should change with this addition to the Criterion Collection--the film's first-ever U.S. video release, and a paradigm of what Criterion exists to do. James Mason (who also produced the picture) is wonderfully subtle in an unlikely role, a Middle American schoolteacher named Ed Avery who's afflicted with a rare inflammation of the arteries. Only experimental hormone treatment can save the man from increasing pain and early death--but misuse of the drug leads to a darkening and distortion of his gentle personality and a nightmare situation for his family. Bigger Than Life isn't a cautionary lesson in the perils of "miracle drugs," even if its genesis was a New Yorker article about a real-life case of cortisone abuse. Instead, consider the film as an adult, flip-side variant of Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (made the year before): an EKG of the American middle class in the Eisenhower era. The medical issues on the surface pale beside, in Jonathan Lethem's phrase, "the anxieties just under the skin of the film"--the personal, cultural, and socio-economic dilemmas that mostly remain unspoken, and unanswerable. The picture is a landmark in the evolution of CinemaScope. Ray was among the first directors to explore the possibilities the wide screen held for psychological and emotional expressiveness (as opposed to mere pictorialism and spectacle), and he uses it brilliantly even though most of the film transpires within a middle-class home. The house is cunningly designed and visualized to seem commonplace, and probably '50s audiences in America registered it that way--just another glance at their everyday reality--while foreign audiences saw lucid and powerful abstraction. Ray invests every sector with dynamic potentiality and meaning, including the acre of thicket and scrub out back that realistically shouldn't be there a stone's throw from the Averys' picture-perfect suburban street. Add the director's bold use of color to underscore the disquiet and intensify the emotional environment, and we have an exemplary modern film. This comes through all the more strongly on the DVD and especially in Blu-ray; the home screen enhances both the abstraction and the specificity of Ray's vision. In the meticulous digital restoration of the original camera negative, the colors are more crisply and definitively there than in any shopworn repertory print or standard TV broadcast. --Richard T. Jameson

Release: August 28, 2018

$6.99

Description

Norman Mailer’s classic comes to the big screen courtesy of director Raoul Walsh (Objective, Burma!; High Sierra) and an ensemble of seasoned actors and fresh-faced up-and-comers. Raymond Massey and Cliff Robertson play officers whose opposing views on military leadership are the two poles between which a platoon’s fate is stretched during the war of the Pacific. Massey’s Gen. Cummings advocates fear as the guide to goading men to face death, whereas Robertson’s Lt. Hearn vehemently disagrees. Hearn is hard-pressed, however, to find the better nature within the sadistic Sgt. Croft (Aldo Ray), whose own wartime ethos seems to be pure hatred. Pounded inside this crucible are the men of the platoon: pals Roth (Joey Bishop) and Goldstein (Jerry Paris), scout Martinez (Henry Amargo), medic Rhidges (James Best), older vet Red (Robert Gist), Southerner Cpl. Wilson (L.Q. Jones), nerve-case…

Release: November 11, 2014

$6.99

Description

A naïve small-town man arrives in Manhattan and is swallowed up by the absurdities of city life.

Release: July 25, 2017

$7.99

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Four coeds from snowbound Penmore U. know that the only place to be during Spring Break is Where the Boys Are. The rites (and wrongs) of the spring migration of thousands of college students to sunny Fort Lauderdale are celebrated in an era-defining film that combines a cast of 1960s up-and-comers with youthful hijinks and a cautionary will-she-or-won't-she storyline of sex and romance. Among the girls seeking the perfect tan and man are Dolores Hart, Yvette Mimieux, Paula Prentiss and Connie Francis (who also performs the hit title tune and the zippy "Turn on the Sunshine"). Among the guys: George Hamilton, Jim Hutton and Frank Gorshin. So many chances for love. So little time! | | Product details | Aspect Ratio : Unknown