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...."
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