"The Man with the Head of Glass", alternatively "The Man with a Head of Glass", is a monologue of about five minutes written by Frank Wilson in 1944. Its creation was a request by Peter Lorre, who was in search of fresh material to engage his audience with. The monologue Wilson came up with appealed to Lorre's interest in psychological terror, had the commercial benefit of echoing Lorre's Star-Making Role in M, and allowed Lorre to insert more content as he pleased.
The monologue opens with the narrator's pleas to be given his hat back during an interrogation. At the prospect of getting it back, he rambles into a delusional confession with the story of how he learned that his head is made of glass and that his murderous thoughts are an open book to all who care to look. So, he got himself a large, heavy, and black hat to keep himself hidden and free to think. In his view, it kept him safe until his hat fell off while he targeted a little girl. It was not long after that a mob formed upon seeing his thoughts and came close to killing him. The narrator ends his confession to complain about being forced into a chair and strapped in. He is appeased when he believes his hat is returned to him, but his aggression resumes when he figures that the thing on his head can't be more than the inner band of a hat. Mistaking the kill switch for a light switch, he rages that no one must touch it because he can't stand the dark. A moment later, the hood is placed over his head, which symbolically takes the place of his cherished hat.
Peter Lorre originally performed "The Man with the Head of Glass" from August 18 to October 20 during a 1944 tour of the East Coast of the United States. Thereafter, he sporadically performed it for the rest of the decade on stage and on the radio, eventually bringing it to television in 1949: on the Texaco Star Theater on March 15 and on BBC's variety program on August 27.
Because Lorre was a popular choice for imitation by comedians, "The Man with the Head of Glass" also fell into their hands as far as any of them had the skill to make something funny out of it. A spoof notable for its circumstances was performed by Don Rickles in Washington, DC on August 24, 1953. It was his well-received opening act that night and the only part he got to do before hearing of his father's passing.
Tropes used in "The Man with the Head of Glass":
- Be Careful What You Wish For: After his arrest, all the narrator wants is his large, heavy, and black hat back so he can hide away his thoughts again. Believing that he'll be given it back, he confesses to a number of murders. For those, he's sentenced to death by the electric chair. As it goes, his head gets strapped in, which he assumes to be a hat's inner band, and then the symbolic rest of a hat follows with the hood that'll cover his head in his final moments.
- Circle of Shame: When he loses his hat, the narrator imagines the crowd laughing at his misery.
- Darkness Equals Death: The narrator can't stand the dark, which is why he's none too pleased about his face being covered by a hood. That the hood is the last thing applied to prepare his execution eludes him.
- Doomed New Clothes: The narrator buys himself a large, heavy, and black hat to prevent people from seeing the violent thoughts inside his head. It is only a matter of time before he loses the hat in a stumble and no longer feeling hidden he no longer acts hidden, which results in his arrest.
- High-Voltage Death: For whatever count of murders the narrator has committed, he is condemned to death by means of the electric chair. Up until his final moments, he's too far gone to realize that's what's happening to him.
- Interrogation Flashback: The entire middle of the monologue is a flashback instigated by an interrogation that makes up the beginning The end covers the narrator's execution.
- A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: The narrator delights in his desire to kill, but is well-aware no one else is appreciative of his thoughts. He is convinced that people can see his thoughts and that that's what causes their hostility towards him. The truth is that they can't, but whatever the narrator believes he only thinks is something he actually acts out.
- The Paranoiac: The narrator believes his head to be made of glass, that therefore his violent thoughts are visible, and that therefore people treat him with hostility. To protect himself, he buys a large, heavy, and black hat to hide his head in. In truth, the narrator is a murderer, but he mostly believes that he only thinks up his murders and that therefore everyone else is hostile for no good reason.
- Restraining Bolt: An implication in the bare script is that as long as the narrator wears his hat and thereby keeps his violent thoughts unseen by others, he does not commit any crimes. Lorre's own additions don't go against this implication, but do make it less obvious.
- Seamless Scenery: Courtesy of the monologue relying entirely on a narrator whose awareness is not always on, the setting effortlessly flows from the time of the narrator's interrogation into the events leading up to his arrest and emerges to the time of his execution.
- Torn Apart by the Mob: By the narrator's assertion that the crowd bears down on him, "striking and biting and tearing and kicking...," he comes very close to being ended by mob justice. There's a narrative gap as to how it ended, but likely the police intervened.
- Unreliable Narrator: The narrator is very far gone in his own reality, which is made clear by his recounting of the event that prompted him to buy a hat. A woman on the streetcar with him becomes enraged and gets the conductor to kick him out, all of which the narrator blames on her seeing his thoughts of strangling her. It's evident that in reality he did attack her, but to him it never happened outside of his thoughts. The narrator's perceived fluidity of reality and thought is furthered in a non-script segment where the narrator outright defends his murders of a man in a blue suit and a housekeeper before concluding that it's okay because he only thought of doing that.
