Just perfect...

Absolutely Fantastic

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

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.

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.

The Upturned Glass was directed by Lawrence Huntington, co-produced by the star, James Mason, and co-written and also starred Mason's wife at the time, Pamela Kellino. It's a psychological study of murder and starts promisingly with a clever set-up. It then leads us on with flashbacks and moody, first person narration. Unfortunately, it ends with the clear impression that the writers created a clever plot but forgot to make the lead sympathetic. We're in a medical school lecture hall and students are crowding in to hear a tall, dark man who looks like James Mason give a lecture on The Psychology of Crime. "Now we come to that much more interesting phenomenon," he tells the students, "the sane criminal…the man who is prepared to pursue his own ethical convictions to the point of murder." He proposes to tell the story of a preeminent surgeon, so dedicated he has no friends and little social life, a cool customer, indeed. The lecturer gives this man a fictitious name, Michael Joyce. And as he speaks, the flashback starts……with Michael Joyce examining the young daughter of a woman whose husband we never meet. Michael Joyce looks just like the lecturer. Is the lecturer telling us his own story? It would be a neat twist if he were. In this tale of irony and obsession, Joyce saves the eyesight of the child and he and the mother, equally lonely, start a relationship that can only lead to her divorcing her husband. Instead, it leads to murder, one of which is carefully planned. "This was a murder conceived in perfect sanity and faultlessly carried out," the lecturer tells his students. But now we realize this all might be a flashback…or a clever man's flash- forward…or perhaps nothing more than a lecture. Pamela Kellino gives a remarkable portrait of a woman who is smart, coquettish, selfish and thoroughly unlikable. She nearly steals the picture from Mason.

In this suspenseful movie, we meet James Mason as he lectures about crime to a group of students. He is an eminent neurologist. In flashback, we learn of the girl whose eyesight he's saved. In the course of doing this, he fell in hove with her mother.It's a murder-mystery; so that's as much plot as I'll give. Pamela Mason is appropriately unappealing as the woman's nosy sister-in-law. Mason, one of my favorite actors, is very good.As a suspense movie -- a noir, of sorts -- it is excellent. It positions itself as more, unfortunately. Initially, it's intriguing to realize that the central figure in the case history Mason's reciting is himself. But there are red herrings. More distracting, there is philosophizing -- not to mention a most unsatisfactory final scene.