Screenshots 2023: Two Faces, One Story, Sort Of

The two versions of A Woman's Face

One of the joys of the late, great FilmStruck was the way it served as a vehicle for exploring themes, directors, stars and even film stories in different settings. Where else could you find the first three versions of A Star Is Born alongside George Cukor's dress rehearsal for the story, What Price Hollywood? (1932), all while the latest remake is playing in theatres? Or Leo McCarey's original Love Affair (1939) followed by the Glenn Gordon Caron remake from 1994, assuming you could stomach the latter after experience the forgotten joys of the former.

I was in the middle of rehearsals and a production run when FilmStruck's impending demise was announced and didn't really have much chance to gorge on the wealth of material from the TCM Library and the Criterion Collection during its final months. One of my last treats, however, was watching the two versions of A Woman's Face within a week of each other. The comparison was surprising. Conventional wisdom holds that the Hollywoodization of international hits results in the coarsening of the source material. Certainly Hollywood made a hash of such classics as Breathless (1960), Les Diaboliques (1955) and The Blue Angel (1930). In the case of A Woman's Face, however, I would suggest that there are distinct ways in which MGM's 1941 remake is superior to the 1938 Swedish original, though both films have their strengths and their flaws.

There's nothing disgraceful about the Swedish original once you get past the sticking point in both films, the notion that making a scarred woman beautiful will completely change her character for the better. Each tells the story of Anna, a female blackmailer who, as a child, was caught in a fire caused by her alcoholic father. A chance encounter with a plastic surgeon (she's trying to sell the man's wife some incriminating letters) leads to her going through a series of surgeries that remove the scar. Then her cohorts send the now beautiful woman to serve as governess to a child who stands between one of her confederates and a large inheritance. She's supposed to help with the child's murder but her new face changes her psychology, moving her away from the path of evil.

In the Swedish version, director Gustaf Molander shoots the story pretty much straight on. His surface realism almost works as a diversionary tactic, giving the film's fallacious assumptions about character some kind of credibility. His work seems to reflect the New Objectivity, a German artistic movement most clearly embodied on screen in the films of G.W. Pabst. It makes sense that a Swedish director in the 1930s would be aping a German film style. Sweden led the rest of Europe in film production in the years before World War I. After a period of recovery, Germany took over, first with Expressionism in the late silent era and then with the New Objectivity. Like Pabst, Molander uses realistic details of décor to reflect the characters' inner lives. The rooms Anna moves through at the film's start are dingy and sparsely furnished, reflecting her lack of connection to anybody around her. As a criminal, her relationships are entirely based on utility. When she moves into her governess position, however, the rooms are more cluttered and homey. She's working in an idyllic mountaintop chateau, a house filled with elements of the natural world that reflect her move into more emotionally committed relationships as she grows fond of her elderly employer and his grandson and falls for her boss's male secretary.

In all of this, Molander is greatly aided by the presence of the young Ingrid Bergman. At just 23, she was fast becoming one of the leading actresses in the Swedish film industry and was only a year away from her move to Hollywood, which would make her a major international star. As the transformed Anna, Bergman is warm and emotionally open. It's a gradual development. On the train ride to the mountain town, she's more withdrawn. This is right after she's gone through the successful surgeries, and she's not used to dealing with the attention her new face brings her. When the man sharing her compartment, her new employer's secretary, tries to flirt with her, she doesn't know what to do. After meeting her charge, the young Lars-Erik, things start to change. The first night at the chateau, she tucks in the child, and he tells her he loves her. Bergman's reaction is a wonder. Molander puts the focus on her as years of bitterness forged by rejection melt away. You can see her transforming into St. Ingrid, the Hollywood image built by performances in films like Casablanca (1943) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), so it's hardly a surprise when she decides to try to save the child.

Her earlier scenes as the bitter, scarred Anna, aren't as effective. The scar is a great piece of make-up, designed under the guidance of Bergman's husband, Dr. Petter Lindström. It pulls down her lower eyelid and pulls her lip into a perpetual sneer. But the young Bergman overplays her hand, snarling out her every line in a way that makes Anna seem a petulant child more than a confirmed criminal. Her performance of those early scenes stacks the deck in favor of reform, which tends to undermine the film's realism. She's so miserable she has to change. A realistic, albeit specious case study turns into a morality play.

Even with that, Bergman is pretty much the whole show. There's nobody in the film who equals her naturalness in the later scenes or the intensity of her emotional commitment. The attempts to match her romantically with the secretary fall flat, and the actor, Gunnar Sjöberg, comes off decidedly weak in comparison. Their romance doesn't feel destined to do anything but fill time. There's no suspense over whether he'll stand by her when the truth about her past comes out, because you really don't see them as any kind of a couple to begin with.

By contrast, the 1941 MGM version is all about romantic suspense. To make the plot more enticing to U.S. film fans, the screenwriters — Donald Ogden Stewart, Elliot Paul and a host of uncredited others, because…Hollywood — give Anna not one but two love interests. The role is now played by Joan Crawford, and multiple suitors would seem to be her due. These men represent the different paths available to Anna, which actually makes the conflict stronger. Rather than the barely tolerated accomplice in the Swedish version, the potential heir becomes a suave, high-society blackmailer (Conrad Veidt) who hooks up with Anna's gang and becomes her lover. At first, he's content simply to share the spoils by giving them access to more affluent victims, but when he sees Crawford transformed, he comes up with the idea of placing her in his uncle's household as governess to the heir apparent.

Since Hollywood and American film audiences would seem to have little truck with male secretaries, the plastic surgeon (Melvyn Douglas) is made a more viable romantic candidate. That, of course, requires getting the dissolution of his marriage past the Production Code. Where Bergman had blackmailed a basically decent woman who has strayed once (the doctor's wife even comes to visit her in the hospital), Crawford's prey is a serial adulteress who seems to have never taken her marital vows seriously. Osa Massen, who plays the role, is also the weakest link in the film's acting ensemble. The leads and character players around her endow their roles with professional expertise and commitment, while she appears to be at a loss for how to read the next syllable. When Crawford smacks the snot out of her in their big confrontation, it seems as much an aesthetic judgment as frustration with the character's whining. How dare Crawford be forced to play against such an inferior scene partner!

This is one of Crawford's better performances (she would often tell interviewers she felt this film made it possible for her to win the Oscar three years later for Mildred Pierce). In early scenes, she contextualizes the character's venom. She has no trouble pushing people around, but she also has a soft side. Her colleagues are a group of petty villains (expertly played by Guy Meek, Reginald Owen and the wonderful Connie Gilchrist) who make fun of her behind her back and at one point trick her into looking into a mirror. Crawford takes just a moment after seeing her scar to register her pain at that treatment before smashing the mirror and turning on them. When Veidt starts working his charms on her, she makes her melting into the affair totally believable. She needs some acknowledgment of her worth as something more than just an expert criminal. She also has moments of surprising restraint. Explaining how she got her scar to Veidt, she rattles off the facts coldly, as if distancing herself from the childhood trauma. It's much stronger than if she had pulled out all the emotional stops. She supplies the facts; the audience supplies the feelings.

Her weakest moments come when the story shifts into melodrama. Veidt shows up for his uncle's birthday and begins to doubt Crawford's commitment to killing the child. Instead of letting her evade the issue, the script has her lying to his face, and that's something that's always been outside Crawford's range. She must have missed the day in acting class when you learn that the point of a lie is to convince the person to whom you're lying. Instead, she plays the subtext. It's an emotionally constipated moment that wouldn't convince anybody, much less an experienced criminal like Veidt.

Fortunately, that scene is over quickly, and we're back into the elaborate fantasy director George Cukor has made of the film. Some historians have tried to diminish his talents by suggesting his most visual films were really the result of his working with consultants like Cecil Beaton on My Fair Lady (1964) and George Hoyningen-Huene, who served as color consultant on all of his films from Bhowani Junction (1956) through The Chapman Report (1962). Certainly he has an ace cinematographer on A Woman's Face, Robert H. Planck, who had worked with Crawford on the visually stunning Strange Cargo (1940). But there's an intelligence to his work overall, even on a film that keeps skirting the edges of claptrap like this, that's all Cukor.

Most of the film is told in flashback, during an inquest into a character's death. Cukor and Planck move into the past with an elegant tracking shot at the roadhouse Crawford's gang runs, where they gather information on future victims. The camera moves with two women dancing, a touch of European decadence that quickly locates the film in a mythical world where the plot seems much more logical.

There's a surprising amount of suspense in this for a Cukor film, and he cuts the suspense scenes just right. It's really the closest he's come to working like Alfred Hitchcock. There's a scene of eavesdropping and near murder in a sunny, snow-filled landscape (shot entirely on the sound stage — more fantasy) that's particularly effective in that vein. He also does a great job revealing Anna's new face in the framing courtroom scenes.. We've heard of the surgery and we've seen Douglas removing her bandages, but we haven't yet seen her face. In court, she wears a wide-brimmed hat that covers the scar's former location, a holdover from earlier days. Halfway through the picture, the judge finally makes her remove her hat to reveal, what else — Joan Crawford. Cukor was wise enough to know that a film like this was basically about becoming Joan Crawford, and he gives her a big, loving close-up. Planck's camera captures the features that made her a star: the high cheekbones, the strong nose, the large, expressive eyes. It's the big payoff the audience has been anticipating for more than 45 minutes.

Then Cukor falters. The film goes back to flashbacks to show her first day out of the hospital. The hat is back, still covering her face as she walks through a park. Then she notices a child staring at her. She panics for a moment. Then the light catches her new face, the child smiles and Brosnislau Kaper's music moves in for the kill. It's a big, sentimental moment that just doesn't fit the rest of the film, which otherwise wallows in a sense of cynical, faux-European decadence. A year later, Crawford's legendary rival, Bette Davis, would have a much more successful reveal in Now Voyager (1942), and it's shocking to think that a plodding director like Irving Rapper could pull off the effect better than a near master like Cukor.

That's followed by a third reveal that wipes away some of the saccharine as Crawford goes to see Veidt. Again, she hides behind the hat while he greets her and goes off to fix her a drink. Then she removes the hat and plays the piano, so that when he comes back, he finally gets the full effect. Veidt does a bit of masterful reacting, combining surprise, delight and a hint of relief that he doesn't have to ignore her appearance any more. That's perfectly logical for the period, when most in the audience would be wondering how he could have made love to the woman she was earlier in the film.

Cukor was always haunted by his reputation as a woman's director, as if there were something wrong with his ability to get great performances out of actresses. In truth, he's a master at getting performances out of all his players, and one of the joys of A Woman's Face is the texture created by strong performances in the supporting roles. That's something the Swedish version, which seems oddly under-populated, lacks. The trial in the MGM film may look like nothing you've ever seen in any court on the planet, but the it's presided over by Henry Kolker, with defense attorney George Zucco (freed from his usual run of B-movie villains) and prosecutor Henry Daniell locking horns, and you know you're in good hands. Except for Massen, there isn't a performance in the film that isn't at least competent, and some are downright inspired.

If anybody comes close to threatening Crawford's status as queen bee, it's Marjorie Main, and that's less a case of scene-stealing than of surprising casting. Main made a career out of playing big-hearted, often slovenly down-home types, most famously as Ma Kettle in a string of low-budget comedies at Universal. Here, she's cast as the cold-hearted (or is she?) housekeeper at the home where Crawford works as governess. She's virtually unrecognizable at first, with her hair whitened and pulled back into a severe bun, and her eyes behind a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. It's a character woman's face, adaptable to any situation, and Main had the talent to bring this particular type to life. She doesn't get to honk out her lines, as she would in her more typical roles. But she snaps out criticisms of Crawford's more lenient approach to child-rearing perfectly. She even gets to hint at greater depths (which is necessary to the plot development). It's a surprisingly rich and nuanced performance from an actress who wasn't always challenged in that way (you can see a little of the same depth in her first appearance as Ma Kettle in 1948's The Egg and I, where the comedy has a more serious side). It's really a joy seeing what she could do in the role, but it doesn't take over the film. If anything, it's a reflection of the joy Crawford takes in her chance to play a strong dramatic role at a time when MGM had already relegated her to the second string. Like Crawford, she's a dedicated actress happy to get her hands on a role that lets her stretch and under the guidance of a director who loved bringing actors to their best.

How to populate a movie: the faces of MGM's A Woman's Face