The Upturned Glass 1947

Michael Joyce, James Mason, a renowned Harley Street brain specialist, is unhappily married and living apart from his wife when he meets Emma Wright, Rosamund John, who brings her young daughter Ann Wright, Ann Stephens, for a consultation. The two fall into a complicated, fleeting affair because neither can commit to marriage, and it ends almost as soon as it begins.

Weeks later, Emma dies after a fall from a second-storey bedroom at her country manor. At the coroner’s inquest, Ann Wright, Ann Stephens, and Emma’s sister-in-law, Kate Howard, Pamela Mason, testify. The death is ruled an accident, but Michael suspects foul play and begins to search for answers beyond the official verdict.

To uncover the truth, Michael enters Kate’s circle, knowing she was aware of Emma’s relationship but unaware that Michael himself had been Emma’s lover. He soon learns that Kate had planned to blackmail Emma for financial gain, a discovery that convinces him the case is a grave injustice. Driven by a desire to correct what he sees as a misjustice, he resolves to act on his own terms.

One afternoon, he drives Kate to Emma’s country house and manipulates events so that she ascends to the same upper-story bedroom from which Emma fell. In a chilling turn, he pushes Kate out of the window, retrieves her body from the courtyard, and loads it into the car to be disposed of over the cliff line by the sea.

En route, a stranded general practitioner asks for a ride to a patient—a 12-year-old girl whose prospects seem fragile. When the doctor seeks a second opinion, Michael looks her over and decides she might have a fighting chance, saving the girl’s life and altering the direction of his own trajectory.

As the journey toward the sea resumes, Michael confronts a mounting realization: he is not a perfectly sane man and his supposed social worth may be a delusion. He nears the edge of the cliff, gazes down at the relentless sea, and, in a fate that mirrors Emma’s and Kate’s, he falls to his death.