A Woman's Face

A Woman's Face is a 1938 Swedish drama film directed by Gustaf Molander, based on the play Il était une fois... by Francis de Croisset. The cast includes Ingrid Bergman in the lead as a woman criminal with a disfigured face. The film was awarded a Special Recommendation at the 1938 Venice Film Festival for its "overall artistic contribution." It was remade in 1941 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with the same title, starring Joan Crawford. Plot Anna Holm is an embittered woman with a facial disfigurement that distorts her eye and mouth on one side and scars her cheek. She has expressed her alienation from society by becoming part of a criminal gang specialising in blackmail. This gang has two notable operations going as the film starts: they are demanding a large sum from a doctor's wife, Mrs. Wegert, for letters she wrote to a lover, and they are pressuring a rich Consul's dissolute nephew, Torsten Barring, who is entangled in their complex schemes and owes them increasing sums, to murder the little boy, the Consul Magnus Barring's orphan grandson, who stands between him and inheriting the Consul's estate. To succeed in this, the gang needs a woman accomplice to be sent as the little boy's governess and help kill him; they deplore the fact that Anna's face makes her ineligible for this.