In the 1930s, Gustav Molander established himself as the best director in Swedish cinema, and certainly the most prolific. Before the decade was over, he had directed 23 feature-length films, and additional alternative language versions of Nordic co-productions. Among these were the six films he directed with Ingrid Bergman in the leading female role between 1935 and 1939, which launched the actress to international stardom. The best of this cycle of films is arguably En kvinnas ansikte, in which the actress plays the disfigured leader of a blackmail ring. First presented off-screen, by voice and shadow only, the effect when she finally faces the camera is of course the more startling, echoing the ‘shock’ of Bergman being cast as a villain. However, the character she is playing is not dissimilar from many of the others she portrayed in those years: a woman with un-revealed secrets who feels out of place, and carries memories of a past that is difficult, if not impossible, to escape.
Part of the film was shot on location in Rämshyttan in central Sweden, including a spectacular nocturnal horsesleigh ride on a frozen lake. A little over a decade earlier it was Greta Garbo, another Swedish actress just about to leave for Hollywood stardom, who was sitting in a sleigh in a desperate ride on the ice, in Mauritz Stiller’s 1924 Gösta Berlings saga. Further links to the silent era of Swedish cinema include the performances of Tore Svennberg and Hilda Borgström, who both acted in Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921), among many other classics.
En kvinnas ansikte, based on a play by French author François Wiener (aka Francis de Croisset), was remade by MGM in 1941 as A Woman’s Face, this time directed by George Cukor, with Joan Crawford in the Ingrid Bergman role.

Jon Wengström