​It’s All-Star Week at BCB After Dark: the hippest hangout for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in out of the heat. Your name is on the guest list. The dress code is casual. We’ve still got a few tables available. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementLast week I asked you if you thought the Cubs should prioritize pitching in the draft. Well, 53 percent of you got your wish as the Cubs took pitchers with 16 out of their 21 picks.Here’s the part with the music and the movies. You can skip ahead if you want. Or you can enjoy the culture and skip the baseball stuff if you want. Or just take it all in.Tonight we’re featuring the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1962 on the “Jazz Casual,” show on NET (the predecessor to PBS). This is complete half-hour program featuring four songs—“The Golden Striker,”“If I Were Eve,”“Winter Tale” and “Lonely Woman.” There’s also a conversation with Lewis in this video.The MJQ were John Lewis on piano, Milt Jackson on vibes, Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay on drums.Bigger Than Life is a 1956 melodrama directed by Nicholas Ray and starring and produced by James Mason. The film was a box-office disappointment when it came out and was met with poor reviews. However, a few years later, some of the French New Wave directors praised it and rehabilitated its reputation a decade later.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementTo put it frankly, Bigger Than Life is just plain nuts. I still haven’t decided if it’s nuts in a good way or nuts in a bad way. I suppose that means it must lean towards the good because if a film makes me think about it for more than ten minutes afterwards, I would argue that it did its job.Mason stars in Bigger Than Life as Ed Avery, a hardworking schoolteacher who is struggling to keep up his middle-class lifestyle. He’s married to a loving wife Lou (Barbara Rush) and he has a son Richie (Christopher Olsen) who is played with all the annoying traits of a kid on screen in the 1950s. Other than the fact that Ed has to take shifts as a cab driver to make ends meet (a fact that he keeps from his suspicious wife), this is the same setup we see in dozens of television shows of the era.However, there’s something medically wrong with Ed. He keeps collapsing, a condition he blames on overwork. But once he does it in front of his wife, he’s rushed to the hospital by his gym teacher best friend Wally (Walter Matthau) where he’s diagnosed with a rare disease. Ed has an inflammation of the arteries, which was a deadly disease in the 1950s. He’s given less than a year to live.