Director: Nicholas Ray
Year Released: 1956
Rating: 3.0
Lower-class schoolteacher James Mason - with a loving wife and son and part-time job as a taxi dispatcher - comes down with a mystery ailment that can only be cured with cortisone, and one of the side-effects of abusing the drug is psychosis. It's a bitter - if depressing - condemnation of 50's morality and conformity and class: the pill 'unleashes' Mason's inner monster and makes him turn into a dictator over his wife and son, mock the peasant milkman, shop for haute couture with his wife and tell his students' parents that the educational system is diseased ... before realizing he needs to sacrifice his son to God. I kind of wonder what kind of movie it would have been had it kept Mason an outspoken heretic and not turned him into outright lunatic there to 'shake up' the rest of the community (social revolutionary instead of silly demonic possession), but it confines the problems to the Mason household and tries to conclude on a (strongly unlikely) positive note.
