MartinHafer Up until about 80-90% of the way though the film, I was very impressed by "The Upturned Glass". It was an interesting thriller that was unique and worth seeing. However, towards the end, the film seemed more hastily written and a bit dumb--especially when the murder occurred.James Mason plays a neurologist who is well-known for his great lectures. In a hall packed with students, he tells the story of a patient who murdered but was NOT mentally imbalanced. While he changes the names of the characters, the film audience can see that the story is about Mason himself--he will eventually kill someone. The story explains all the events leading up to it. Then you learn that he has NOT yet killed but wanted, in a crazy way, to tell others about his plan before executing it. All this is quite good. However, when he then executes the plan, it's amazingly sloppy and he makes many mistakes. I didn't like this but at least the film in the end redeemed itself with a dandy ending. In many ways, this is almost like a British version of noir. Interesting and worth seeing.By the way, look for the scene with the 'American' soldier. His accent was TERRIBLE and he clearly sounded like a Brit trying to sound American. I assume in American-made films, we Yanks must sound the same way when we portray Brits!

bkoganbing James Mason in one of his last British films before accepting that contract with MGM and leaving for America plays a doctor who may have become too detached from life. A prominent brain surgeon he accepts the case of young Ann Stephens whose eyesight he saves with a delicate operation. In the process he falls in love with Ann's mother Rosamund John.Both Mason and John are separated from their respective spouses and we never meet either of them in The Upturned Glass. But their relationship contains a mixture of guilt for both of them. Shortly after they end things, Mason hears that John falls to her death in her own home.Mason had already met Pamela Kellino and formed a bad opinion of her almost immediately. She's Rosamund's sister-in-law and Stephen's aunt and she's a selfish materialistic woman, a regular Cruela DeVille in real life. She's easy too hate and Mason courts her to get close.The film is told about 2/3 of the way in flashback as Mason lectures to a university class on the atypical murderer, the sane and logical one which he naturally takes himself to be. The rest of the film is a revealing portrayal of how Mason should be seen.The Upturned Glass is a nice bit of melodramatic noir with Mason really carrying this film. His perfect performance makes The Upturned Glass seem far better than it really is.

ackstasis In 'The Upturned Glass (1947),' Mason stars as a prominent neurosurgeon giving a lecture on criminology. He offers the case study of Michael Joyce, an upright British gentleman – considered perfectly sane by the good doctor – who is driven to commit murder by "his own ethical convictions." The film's first half is a slow, steady narrative build up, but the final act is perfectly suspenseful. Our poor protagonist, having just committed the ultimate crime, has a ridiculous time trying to dispose of the body without detection– in the classic noir mould, one inconvenient encounter after another! Michael Joyce (whom we learn is none other than the lecturer himself) has convinced himself that, unlike most common thugs, he has a superior moralistic justification for committing murder. 'The Upturned Glass' was released four years after the close of WWII, and was likely intended as a critique of state-sanctioned (that is, "justified") mass murder; Mason, the film's producer, was famously a conscientious objector during the war, a view which caused much consternation among his family. To keep you guessing, there are also a few red herrings that Hitchcock would have loved – and this is three years before 'Stage Fright (1950)' wrote the book on red herrings. However, the film ends on a definite moralistic note, suggesting the lengths to which one will go to maintain the delusion of sanity, and questioning whether it is even possible for a sane person to commit murder. Even the impromptu saving of a young girl with brain injuries does not offset a murder already committed, and Michael Joyce dies by his own hand. I couldn't help feeling that Joyce, and perhaps the film, were taking the easy way out.

mevolve It's almost parody, when you are immersed into a dark, forbidding noir world -- populated by proper English gentry. But THE UPTURNED GLASS is a superior crime piece, with a distinctive English taint. That taint being, essentially, the story of a respected brain-surgeon with a very staid life of drawing room seclusion and introspection -- read, the image/stereotype of the ideal British "gentleman" -- who chooses to exit his world of detached observation, to exact justice in a personal matter. In a nutshell: James Mason plays a brain surgeon, who recounts in a lecture, an incident of crime to a university class. In flashback, we see his affair with a married woman (Rosamund John) after treating his daughter, and their mutual breaking off of the engagement. Later, when she "falls from a window," Mason suspects murder. We see the details of his plan to revenge himself on his lover's sister (Pamela Mason), and everything goes exactly as planned. But when it comes to actually committing the act, it does not go so smoothly.... Brefini O'Rourke and Mason engage in an interesting debate at the close of the movie, that lays out the pertinent moral dilemma (as well as the significance of the title): Do we do what is right because it is right, or do we do it because of personal gain, flaws, obsessions, etc.? A theme which would be echoed later, and very closely to THE UPTURNED GLASS's method (and much more horrificly), in both versions of THE VANISHING. Mason ends this movie, on the edge of the cliffs over Dover beach, where there lies "no certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain," as Matthew Arnold sees it: Mason ends his long day of murder and things gone terribly awry in blind ignorance, alone and -- as the camera does not even pick up his final fall or his broken body -- forgotten, lost. Mason and his wife (who co-produced and co-wrote respectively) were experimenting with structure in THE UPTURNED GLASS; the result is an interesting story that feels to be told in two parts. It takes its time to build (ever a British trait), but once the story gets going, it is relentless in its tension; especially during the twenty-minute or so sequence where Jason Mason attempts to escape with Pamela Mason's body. Though it's a green and pleasant land we are moving through here, the camera's eye chooses only to see it through a lens darkly, and starkly: an empty house of shadows, a chapel that is all but a ruin of shadows, fog-lit moorish wastes, the good doctor's own living quarters practically infested with shadows itself. James Mason is phenomenal, taking a role where he is ever so slightly detached from whatever scene is at hand. Paranoia seems to be part and parcel of his make-up, and often throughout the movie, it appears as if we are often seeing events as *he* sees them: students asking questions, party-hosts with probing eyes, a good country doctor staring at you through his spectacles -- every one of them might be doing more than just looking at you, they might very well be looking *through* you... probing you, inspecting, judging. We never know if his lover really *was* murdered in the end, or if she jumped volunatarily, or if it really were simply an accident after all. Mason's scheme doesn't allow, or worry, about that at all: his is an inchoate vengeance, directed at nobody in particular, not even fate, really. Pamela Mason is simply the most readily available target for a fatal flaw, as was the poor girls that book-end the movie: the nameless, faceless one hit by the lorry at the end, or the young daughter a victim of a brain-splinter at the beginning. In the sudden climax of THE UPTURNED GLASS, no one knows anything for sure -- not love, not hate, and hardly anything like certainty... we are all just rocks, washed up on an empty beach, "where ignorant armies clash by night...."