Maverick US helmer Nicholas Ray forged this richly allegorical melodrama the year after Rebel Without A Cause. A startling, subversive work, it stars a brooding James Mason as Ed Avery, an overworked suburban schoolteacher who's diagnosed with an incurable inflammation of the arteries. Prescribed the experimental drug cortisone by doctors, the psychological side effects are alarming: scorning "petty domesticity", Ed begins to bully his wife (Barbara Rush) and child (Christopher Olsen) while being gripped by megalomaniac, homicidal impulses.
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