Nicholas Ray’s furious, agonized 1956 melodrama “Bigger Than Life” (which I discuss in this clip) is based on a non-fiction article by Berton Roueché that appeared in The New Yorker the year before. Entitled “Ten Feet Tall” (a line that turns up in the movie), the report (available to subscribers), like the movie, concerns a schoolteacher who is afflicted with the rare and hitherto rapidly fatal disease periarteritis nodosa and is treated with a new medicine called cortisone (Rouché’s subject also receives a hormone called ACTH) which saves his life (indeed, brings about rapid improvement, enabling him to return to his work and his family) but causes psychological disturbances.
The real-life patient lived in Queens; the movie is set in a small town. The movie is an external dramatization of events involving the illness, recovery, and derangement. The article features copious interviews with the pseudonymous teacher “Robert Laurence” and his wife. Rouché describes the teacher’s behavior as becoming “tyrannical,” characterized by delusions of grandeur, manically and irresponsibly exuberant episodes, madly visionary schemes of domestic and academic order, and violent outbursts of domineering anger. He was diagnosed with what Roueché calls “a cortisone-induced manic-depressive psychosis.” It’s an extraordinary report; the details are quite as engrossing and poignant as those in the movie—but not as moving or horrifying. Ray and the screenwriters distill the story to a looming chaos that always seemed latent in the teacher’s pre-psychotic life and establish the teacher’s hubristic schemes with a burningly clear intellectual vanishing point. The story captures trouble disturbing the surfaces of placid normalcy. Ray’s film, meanwhile, exposes the terrifying contradictions and disturbances in so-called normalcy itself, both personal ones and philosophical ones. The report is fascinating; the movie is profound.
