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.
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.