The inordinately vain Joan Crawford spends the first half of A Woman's Face trying to disguise a scar that might have been left over from Charles Laughton's makeup as Quasimodo. Generally such desperate measures indicate a lightweight glamour-puss striving for recognition as a `serious' actress. But perhaps as the result of having, for once, to flee the camera rather than hog it, she gives one of her stronger, most varied performances. It's the rest of the movie a dark drama gussied up into an MGM confection that's pretty enough but leaves doubts about how seriously to take it.
It takes place in a back-lot Sweden where Crawford plays a woman disfigured in a fire that killed her drunken father. In consequence, she's turned against a world that recoils from her, becoming the head of a larceny and blackmail ring. Then two men enter her stoppered-up life.
One is unctuous grifter Conrad Veidt, who finds in Crawford an emotionally vulnerable yet scruple-free pawn whom he can use to further his schemes. The other is physician Melvyn Douglas, whose wife (Ona Musson) Crawford is blackmailing for cheating on him; he takes pity on Crawford and surgically transforms her into, well, Joan Crawford. Veidt is delighted with her new eligibility to be received in polite society, and lands her a post as governess to his rich young nephew in the countryside; he means for her to knock the kid off so the family money will devolve to him.
The story's told entirely in flashback from Crawford's trial for murder, but in the shrewd script directed by George Cukor, we don't know until the end who was murdered, or if she's guilty. Various witnesses relate their accounts of the events leading up to the alleged crime (among them Marjorie Main as a jealous housekeeper). And during those flashbacks we leave Sweden and Planet Earth to pass into that higher reality that only Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could vouchsafe us.
We're meant to believe that this orphan who managed to survive from girlhood on the shady side of law managed somehow to acquire a measure of culture (`I've read every love letter ever published,' she tells Veidt; when he asks if she likes music, she answers, unanswerably, `Most symphonies, some concertos'). There's a scene set in a labyrinthine attic into which all of Attic Greece could be stored; it's replete with fastidiously arranged cobwebs and a full suit of armor. And at a party in the country house, guests in festive native garb dance an elaborately choreographed number never danced in Sweden but imaginable only on the sound stages of Culver City (and this is no musical).
Somewhere, in all this Nordic never-never land, Crawford is asked to make a journey from bitterness through acceptance into a smiling world to a grudge-match with her conscience and a daring, redemptive act; it's not owing to her shortcomings that she can't quite make a convincing character in this neo-Victorian melodrama. Ingrid Bergman played the part in a Swedish production just three years earlier did she pull it off? If she did, it's probably because she wasn't bogged down in suffocating production values.
It takes place in a back-lot Sweden where Crawford plays a woman disfigured in a fire that killed her drunken father. In consequence, she's turned against a world that recoils from her, becoming the head of a larceny and blackmail ring. Then two men enter her stoppered-up life.
One is unctuous grifter Conrad Veidt, who finds in Crawford an emotionally vulnerable yet scruple-free pawn whom he can use to further his schemes. The other is physician Melvyn Douglas, whose wife (Ona Musson) Crawford is blackmailing for cheating on him; he takes pity on Crawford and surgically transforms her into, well, Joan Crawford. Veidt is delighted with her new eligibility to be received in polite society, and lands her a post as governess to his rich young nephew in the countryside; he means for her to knock the kid off so the family money will devolve to him.
The story's told entirely in flashback from Crawford's trial for murder, but in the shrewd script directed by George Cukor, we don't know until the end who was murdered, or if she's guilty. Various witnesses relate their accounts of the events leading up to the alleged crime (among them Marjorie Main as a jealous housekeeper). And during those flashbacks we leave Sweden and Planet Earth to pass into that higher reality that only Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could vouchsafe us.
We're meant to believe that this orphan who managed to survive from girlhood on the shady side of law managed somehow to acquire a measure of culture (`I've read every love letter ever published,' she tells Veidt; when he asks if she likes music, she answers, unanswerably, `Most symphonies, some concertos'). There's a scene set in a labyrinthine attic into which all of Attic Greece could be stored; it's replete with fastidiously arranged cobwebs and a full suit of armor. And at a party in the country house, guests in festive native garb dance an elaborately choreographed number never danced in Sweden but imaginable only on the sound stages of Culver City (and this is no musical).
Somewhere, in all this Nordic never-never land, Crawford is asked to make a journey from bitterness through acceptance into a smiling world to a grudge-match with her conscience and a daring, redemptive act; it's not owing to her shortcomings that she can't quite make a convincing character in this neo-Victorian melodrama. Ingrid Bergman played the part in a Swedish production just three years earlier did she pull it off? If she did, it's probably because she wasn't bogged down in suffocating production values.