The Upturned Glass (Sidney Box Productions, Gainsborough, Riverside, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last night Charles and I watched a YouTube movie that turned out to be unexpectedly good: The Upturned Glass, a 1947 British thriller starring James Mason in what at first appears to be two roles – a college professor and a surgeon – in which Mason the professor tells his lecture audience that he will be talking to them about the case of a renowned doctor whom he will call “Michael Joyce” as an example of how a perfectly normal and previously law-abiding citizen can commit a rationally planned murder for readily understandable reasons. It doesn’t take us long to figure out that Mason’s character is really talking about himself. He tells the story of how he met a married woman, Emma Wright (Rosamond John), when she brought her 12-year-old daughter Ann (Ann Stephens) in for eye surgery to keep her from going blind. As Joyce stays involved in the Wrights’ lives during Ann’s long recovery period, he starts falling for Emma even though both of them are married. He’s already told us that his marriage was unhappy, and Emma has had to endure long absences from her husband Philip because he’s a geologist and goes on years-long expeditions. Their relationship goes as far as a couple of long, lingering kisses before Joyce abruptly breaks it off – which makes me wonder if the writers, John P. Monaghan and Pamela Kellino (more on her later), were influenced by Noël Coward’s play Brief Encounter and the highly successful British movie made of it just two years earlier, since that story also turns on a love affair between people married to others which likewise stops short of actual sex.

Shortly after their breakup, Joyce learns that Emma is dead – she fell from a second-story window of her country home in what the coroner’s jury officially ruled an accident, but Joyce is convinced that Emma was actually murdered by her sister-in-law, Katherine “Kate” Howard (Pamela Kellino) – yes, that’s right: the co-writer of this movie is also in it, and behind the scenes she was then Mrs. James Mason. She was born Pamela Ostrer, daughter of Isidore Ostrer, one of the family that controlled Gaumont-British studios, and “Kellino” was the name of her first husband, director Ray Kellino. She met James Mason on the set of I Met a Murderer, a 1939 film Ray Kellino directed, and while making the film together she and Mason had an affair. She subsequently divorced Kellino and married Mason; he would divorce her in 1964, but his two children, son Morgan and daughter Portland, were both with her. Joyce drives up to Emma’s old house and literally breaks in; he’s found out by the caretaker, Clay (Morland Graham), but eventually Clay decides that Joyce is no ordinary burglar. Once he visits Emma’s room he’s more convinced than ever that she was murdered and her sister-in-law Kate did it, and we even get a flashback showing just how Kate did in Emma. Joyce starts dating Kate, but it’s clear he’s only worming his way into her confidence so he can figure out a way to kill her, preferably by pushing her out the same window from which Kate pushed Emma to her death. Ultimately he does so, but the pesky caretaker who turns up earlier than expected forces him to pick up the body (substantially easier than it would be for real – apparently the writers and director Lawrence Huntington had never heard of “dead weight”) and load it into his car.

While he’s driving away from the scene he’s sidetracked by two people, including a fellow doctor who’s on his way to treat a patient, a 12-year-old girl living with her grandmother ini an out–of-the-way location. It doesn’t take us loing to realize that the girl is Ann Wright – though like the fact that the murderer and the professor lecturing about him are the same person, this isn’t stressed the way it would have been in an American film – and even in the most adverse conditions imaginable, operating in a private home and needing a basin of hot water to sterilize his instruments, Joyce is able to save Ann again. Alas, the doctor who recruited him on the case, Dr. Farrell (Brefni O’Rorke, an astonishingly close “type” to George Zucco), has correctly diagnosed Joyce as mentally ill, a paranoiac, and even though Farrell goes out to Joyce’s car and either doesn’t see or doesn’t recognize Kate Howard’s body (Joyce sent him there to get an emergency medication he needed for Ann’s surgery), Joyce is guilt-ridden enough that he drives his car to the side of a cliff and, rather than throw Kate’s body off it (as I was expecting), or driving his car off the cliff and thereby making it look like they both died in an accident (also one of the alternate possibilities I was predicting), he stands on the side of the cliff and ultimately goes over. The End.

The Upturned Glass is quite a good movie and an artistic triumph for both Mr. and Mrs. Mason; between her acting and the script she co-wrote, she easily matches him and etches an indelible portrait of a “bad” but not totally evil woman, outrageously self-centered (during the film she tries to grab custody of Ann just to screw Emma’s mother and her own husband out of it, especially since she has no intention of trying to raise Ann herself and wants to farm her out to a boarding school instead) but falling short of out-and-out psychopathy. I’ve often criticized movies (especially recent ones) for not having any central characters we actually like, but though that’s true of The Upturned Glass it’s not a film that suffers from that. Aside from Emma, who’s really too good to be true, the characters here are memorable for their human combinations of good and bad points, and this film achieves a moral complexity relatively unusual for a thriller. It’s also interesting in that the second-billed actress actually gets killed relatively early on – though she does reappear in a flashback – much the way James Whale did with Gloria Stuart in the woefully underrated The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933) and Mason’s future director, Alfred Hitchcock, did wit Janet Leigh in Psycho in 1960, 13 years later.