Scifirenegade's Trash Can

If Cukor suggested Joan Crawford for Susan and God, it was Crawford who wanted Cukor in A Woman's Face. The actress was convinced that, in this difficult phase of her career, only a big dramatic triumph could shed light to her ambitions. As one knows, this dream had to wait until 1945, with Mildred Pierce. And the filmmaker who "turned her career around" wouldn't be Cukor, but Michael Curtiz (but Crawford was loyal and declared that the Oscar she won for Curtiz's film was truly because of A Woman's Face). It's curious to note, however, that it's Cukor who takes a new turn in Crawford's career, just as he's directing Garbo and Norma Shearer's latest films.

A Woman's Face is a film that, simbolically, has something to tell us about the two personalities that participate in it, Cukor and Crawford: the first, the ethical value of beauty, that is, beauty as a criteria for moral measurement. It's curious Cukor directed this film, a man so profoundly concious about his uglyness, who searched relentlessly for beauty in others. Anna, in the film, was bad because she was ugly, it's in the horrible scar that disgures her that lives the origin and the cause of her evil. After the surgery, the face that appears can only be good. Cukor said, a bit ironically, that, in the first half of A Woman's Face, there was the work of an actress giving it her all: in his half, however, there was only Joan Crawford's face. In Crawford's part we have, let's say, the opposite situation: tired of being "pretty" in numerous MGM productions in which she did little more than showcasimg Adrian's models from one side of the screen to the other, she wanted now to prove that it wasn't only her face that mattered, but her acting talent. A Woman's Face appears at a time in which Crawford wants to destroy her own image (and note the film was done against Mayer, who believed it to be unthinkable to make Crawford "ugly") that would culminate in Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954). Moreover, the intense suffering and to fill a film eith this suffering would be Crawford's hallmark from now on. The love affair with the camera still persists (perhaps to a lesser degree), but the way of sweeping the public away was different.