PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

manderstoke One of the earlier reviewers suggested that the film takes "the easy way out." I partially agree, but think that the real reason for the disappointing finale was the censors. They, in their moral righteousness, did their very best to ruin any number of UK and American films. In this case, the ending makes little sense. Otherwise, a very satisfying early addition to the film noir genre. The photography and pacing are perfect and carry the bleak mood. A minor quibble is that the notion of the lovers breaking off wasn't totally credible, but then, perhaps it was a different moral universe in the 1940s. Mason, as always, is excellent to the point that the viewer cannot take his eyes off of him (not that one would want to). Pamela is a hateful character, as from all reports, she was in real life.

malcolmgsw 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.

MartinHafer Up until about 80-90% of the way though the film, I was very impressed by "The Upturned Glass". It was an interesting thriller that was unique and worth seeing. However, towards the end, the film seemed more hastily written and a bit dumb--especially when the murder occurred.James Mason plays a neurologist who is well-known for his great lectures. In a hall packed with students, he tells the story of a patient who murdered but was NOT mentally imbalanced. While he changes the names of the characters, the film audience can see that the story is about Mason himself--he will eventually kill someone. The story explains all the events leading up to it. Then you learn that he has NOT yet killed but wanted, in a crazy way, to tell others about his plan before executing it. All this is quite good. However, when he then executes the plan, it's amazingly sloppy and he makes many mistakes. I didn't like this but at least the film in the end redeemed itself with a dandy ending. In many ways, this is almost like a British version of noir. Interesting and worth seeing.By the way, look for the scene with the 'American' soldier. His accent was TERRIBLE and he clearly sounded like a Brit trying to sound American. I assume in American-made films, we Yanks must sound the same way when we portray Brits!

Terrell-4 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.