Last night I found a riveting Brrrittish thriller called "The Upturned Glass"(1947). Chames Mason stars as a brain surgeon who gets involved with the mother of a young patient. The movie uses a narration device that I've never seen before. As it opens, Mason is giving a lecture to a group of medical students. The subject is abnormal psychology as it relates to homicide. He goes through the casebook of convicted murderers with conditions ranging from schizophrenia to psychosis and tells the students why they kill. Then he switches gears and explains the mental processes of a perfectly sane killer who plans his crime using logic. To illustrate the example, he presents a hypothetical story of a man who murdered his lover. His lecture continues as narration and we see the story he is describing onscreen.
Though the students don't know it (but we do), the hypothetical "sane killer" is himself. It is his own story he is narrating. Mason goes back to the beginning to relate how it all unfolded.
One day, a woman - "Emma Wright" (Rosamund John) - brought her daughter to his office. She was injured in an air raid (this is wartime) and is going blind. Mason diagnoses the problem, a piece of shrapnel on her optic nerve. He operates and saves the little girl's eyesight. This brings him close to her mother and they fall in love as a result. The trouble is that both of them are married. Each is estranged from their spouse, yet they still feel it's wrong to cheat. Finally they break it off, but Emma has an evil sister-in-law named "Kate" (Pamela Mason, wife of Chames), who's found out about her affair with Mason and blackmails her. Emma then commits suicide by jumping from a windum in her house.
Mason is brokenhearted. His relationship with Emma was the only real love he's ever known, and at first he's unaware of the blackmail. But he's suspicious of the coroner's suicide ruling, so he goes to visit Kate to pry for information. Using his Masonic charm, he courts and pretends to fall in love with her. In getting to know Kate, he can see she had no feelings for Emma. She's totally self-absorbed. But one day he runs into Ann, the little girl he operated on. She's hiding a secret but Mason coaxes it out of her. "She made Mummy do it"!, Ann tells him, referring to Kate. "They had an argument right before she died. She said horrible things to Mummy and I know that's why she killed herself". Mason digs some more and discovers from other sources the specifics of Kate's blackmail scheme. He's so pissed that he decides to kill her, in a way that will never be discovered. He'll commit the perfect murder; the one he's lecturing his students about.
In the classroom, he tells the story in past tense, as if it's already happened. But it hasn't. Now we cut back to real time. The narration is over and Mason is leaving the lecture hall. It's as if he told the story to gear himself up, because now he's going to carry out his plan. He picks up Kate and drives her to Emma's house, now abandoned, using the excuse that he just wants to examine it. "I want to see the window she supposedly jumped from. I'm still having a hard time believing it was suicide".
"Oh, it was, I can assure you", Kate replies. "I don't know if you're aware of it, but Emma was seeing a married man. He broke it off and she became despondent".
"Is that so"?, says Chames Mason. Kate has no idea he's aware she just lied to him. She doesn't know he's the married man in question. Once inside Emma's house, he leads Kate upstairs, then to the room from which she jumped. He kills Kate by throwing her out the windum, and I'm sorry for the spoiler but that's not the end, and the ending must be given a disclaimer.
The first hour of "The Upturned Glass" is as tight and involving a murder mystery as you could ask for. It's got that brilliant narrative device explained above, and the plot leads you down a convoluted path via Mason's romantic defrauding of Kate. But after he kills her - whoa nelly - the screenwriter decided to create the last act out of whole cloth. It's so absurd and has so little relation - as far as making sense - to what has gone before, that you'll have to have a PhD in Disbelief Suspension to accept it.
Now then : having said that, the Final Absurdity (which runs 20 minutes), doesn't ruin the movie. At least it didn't for me. Yes, it's ridiculous, but the director was able to maintain the suspenseful tone that led to this point. The scenario calls for a drive in the fog, with Kate's body in Mason's car, so you at least have a continuation of the dark, sinister mood. Then it turns into the writer's Fantasyland, with some postulating on what constitutes sanity by Mason and another character. I won't tell you who he is, but good grief gimme a break. The ending is a downer, too. But again! (and this is important), it does not ruin the movie.
It makes it pretty kooky, but doesn't ruin it. So I just wanted you to be aware of what's coming when you watch, and I hope you do because I'm giving the movie Two Big Thumbs Up. Chames Mason is great as always, playing yet another Man In Emotional Turmoil. The Youtube print is excellent so give it a shot. Despite my caveat, I nonetheless highly recommend it. ////
The previous night we watched another Paul Shortino called "The Inner Circle"(1946). How short is short? In this case only 56 minutes, which is stretching the limits of calling it a movie (and have we ever determined a cutoff point)? How bout 55? We can drive 55 - anything less and we'll have to pull over. At that point we won't consider it an Official Movie, but using that standard, 56 minutes qualifies.
Anyhow, it was a fun flick, a crime film with screwball timing. Adele Mara is an assertive dame who "hires herself" as the secretary for Johnny Strange, private detective. She just walks in to his office and tells him she's got the job. "Saved you the money for an ad", she adds. As his new Gal Friday, she takes her first call, then steers Johnny to a red hot crime scene. A gossip columnist has been murdered. The cops haven't even been there yet. Johnny meets a woman in front of the dead man's apartment. She was the caller. She wears a veil and has an accent. "It was I who discovered the body" she tells him. Johnny enters the apartment, only to be knocked unconscious by the veiled woman. She stages the crime scene to make it look like Johnny did it.
Fred Mertz (William Frawley) is the head of homicide down at police headquarters. Johnny's got a lot of 'splainin to do to get Mertz off his case (wait a minute, that's Lucy and Ricky.....get with it, Ad). Gal Friday's got an alibi ready for her boss. She's way ahead of Johnny Strange on this, her first case.
Speaking of endings and narration like we did with the first film, 'The Inner Circle" also uses a nifty device to reveal the culprit at the end. Johnny enlists a pal down at the local radio station to broadcast a show featuring himself, Gal Friday and all of the major suspects (and Fred Mertz too), re-creating the crime on air. If you recall just a couple of blogs ago, we were talking about "Account Rendered", the English film with dialogue so tight that it could have been a radio drama. Well how bout a movie that turns into one? That's "The Inner Circle", a slam-bang sparkler of a crime flick that gets Two Big Thumbs for being fun.
And since we're on Strange Detail tonight, what with Johnny Strange and that ending in "The Upturned Glass", I have to ask a question : What's the deal with Will Writght? He's an actor in "The Inner Circle" and I'm sure you've seen him. He's tall, gaunt and ancient, with a hayseed curmudgeon persona. He's been in a million movies. But he's listed as being born in 1894, which would make him 52 in this film. Now, we've talked about actors whose appearances changed, including Richard Boone whom we wrote about recently. He appeared to age drastically and looked extremely run down late in his career, which was likely due to boozing and cigarettes. But with Will Wright it's like he's 52 going on 90. I looked him up on IMDB for the specific reason of expecting him to break our record for the earliest motion picture actor yet seen. I kid you not, I thought he was at least 85 years old, which would've made his birth year around 1860. So I was shocked to discover he was only 52, almost a decade younger than Tom Cruise is now.
The thing is, it's not a Keith Richards trip I'm talking about (or a Richard Boone). Will Wright doesn't look beat up as a result of hard living, he just looks and sounds old. And not just old but elderly, like 85 or 90. Unless he was lying about his age and year of birth, then he was 52 when he made "The Inner Circle", and he died at 68 in 1962. It's one of the weirdest physical appearances I've seen on any actor, and it's not from makeup, either. It's just some "weird, wild stuff, Ed".
"You, are correct, sir"! (slaps knee and guffaws).
That's all for tonight. Hope you had a nice weekend. I send you tons of love, as always.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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