That's the advice that doctor Brefni O'Rorke (Dr Farrell) gives to surgeon James Mason (Joyce) when giving an analogy comparing insanity to an upturned glass balancing on a mantelpiece. So, that's exactly what Mason does! The film is told in flashback as Mason narrates a lecture to students on the topic of the criminal mind. He presents a case of a sane man committing murder. It's no revelation to the film audience that he is recounting his own story. What is interesting in this technique is that we realize he hasn't actually carried out the act and we then find ourselves in real time at the end of the lecture as he goes ahead with his plan after what can be seen as his confession to the students.The root of his problem is a love affair with Rosamund Wright (Emma) which cannot be. The ending of the relationship coincides with some tragic news and Mason then turns to Pamela Mason (Kate) to discover the truth and exact revenge. The real events of the tragedy are never fully confirmed and so Mason's actions are very suspect. Is he insane? He certainly seems to be acting on a whim. Pamela Mason is excellent in her role and certainly had me rooting for her. I'm not sure this was the intention, though! The young girl whose sight Mason saves at the beginning of the film is played by Ann Stephens who died aged 35 in 1966. I can't find any details on how she died. Can anyone help on this? It would be interesting to know. She delivers some amusing dialogue about not liking her hair and Pamela Mason's dialogue regarding her is flippantly wonderful – I'll send her boarding – ha ha. The best of us have all spent time boarding as a child. As for the film's title, I still don't know what an upturned glass means? Which way?

This film was released at the height of the interest in psychological thrillers.the film starts up quite slowly works up to a crescendo and then rather falls flat at the end.It is nevertheless an intriguing film in many ways.Mason has it fixed in his mind just how easy it would be to kill Kellino.However the reality is that it turns into a violent struggle with him ending up strangling her then tossing her out the window.This rather anticipates the scene in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain with the gruesome killing of the Stasi agent.One wonders if Mason wished he had gone through with the actual deed bearing in mind his acrimonious divorce from Kellino a few years later!There is mention of an upturned glass but its meaning is never properly explained.At the end Mason commits suicide by leaping off a cliff.This is incorrect for 2 reasons.Firstly nowhere in the description of Paranoia,is there an indication that the symptoms include suicidal tendencies.Also there are no chalk cliffs near Portsmouth.One final point.I wonder if the American censors office asked for a change of endings.They would not sanction a suicide by a criminal as they considered it a mortal sin.Also they insisted on moral compensating values ie the villain must pay for his sins.

As a popular British criminologist, James Mason tells a class full of intrigued students about a supposedly sane man who plotted murder over revenge. Over the first hour, the writers present a very intriguing case involving a doctor who saves a young girl on the operating table then falls in love with her mother. He plots revenge when the young woman dies mysteriously after falling out of a second story window in her house. All is fine for the first two thirds of the movie until the true crime comes to light and a plethora of incidents occur that take the screenplay all over the place. While the movie is beautifully filmed and is interesting throughout, the last 15 minutes of the movie take a lot of dramatic license in wrapping the story up. Mason is mesmerizing as always, but the title really has nothing to do with the plot. For film noir fans, there are many elements there of that genre, including some dark and moody photography and a femme fatal that will go down as one of the most unlikable in film history.

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.