Bergman’s performance as a disfigured leader of a blackmail ring is arguably the best of her pre-Hollywood career. 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 Ingrid Bergman being cast as a villain. But in fact the character she is playing is not dissimilar from many of the other she portrayed in those years; again the character is a woman with un-revealed secrets, finding herself in contexts and milieus where she feels out-of-place and carrying memories of a past which is difficult, if not impossible, to escape from.
En kvinnas ansikte is the prime example of Swedish film industry craftsmanship of the 1930’s, and is also the finest work of the era of director Gustaf Molander and cinematographer Åke Dahlqvist, frequent collaborators at AB Svensk Filmindustri’s studios in Råsunda. Part of the film was shot on location in Rämshyttan in central Sweden, including a spectacular nocturnal horse-sleigh 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 The Saga of Gosta Berling. Other links to the silent Golden Age of Swedish cinema are the performances of Tore Svennberg and Hilda Borgström, who 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 directed by George Cukor, with Joan Crawford in the Ingrid Bergman role.