The Upturned Glass

More Brit noir...

The Upturned Glass is an example of a Hitchcockian thriller than doesn't have the benefit of being directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It's engaging enough, with some interesting moments of suspense, but it lacks the snap of the master's touch.

The film starts with a doctor (James Mason) giving a college lecture on the "psychology of murder." He tells the class about the sane criminal, and illustrates his point by telling them a story about a brain surgeon, who is also played by James Mason. This cuts out some suspense right away, as we know the lecturer is referring to himself, something that could be withheld in prose. Anyway, Mason, unhappily married (we never see his wife) operates on a young girl to save her eyesight. He and her mother end up falling in love, but because they are both married decide to end the relationship. He is shocked to learn that his beloved has died, falling out of a window.

When he attends the inquest, he suspects the dead woman's sister-in-law (Pamela Kellino, Mason's real-life wife and also the co-author of the script). Mason, investigating the death on his own, seduces Kellino, and decides to take revenge, but not before he details the plans of his plot in his lecture. He kills Kellino, and ends up driving around the foggy countryside of England with her body in his backseat. He is stopped by a country doctor needing assistance, and ends up being faced with the dilemma of whether or not to perform an emergency operation on a young girl to save her life.

There are some nice moments in the film. When we realize that Mason's lecture is not after the murder, but before it, makes for some interesting tension, and then the scenes immediately after the murder, when things start to wrong for him, are malevolently humorous. In Hitchcock fashion a key becomes important, but only for a moment, which makes its inclusion somewhat superfluous. Mason plays the upper-crust Brit all the way through, and at times seemed as if he were asleep, while Kellino plays her character as nasty and shrill from the get-go.