Joan Crawford gives one of her few vulnerable performances in this drama of a Swedish woman, Anna Holm, whose face has been scarred by a traumatic childhood incident. Taking out her bitterness against an unsympathetic world, she becomes the leader of a blackmail ring in Stockholm's rough underworld. Conrad Veidt is knowing and sinister as a ruthlessly ambitious aristocrat who involves Anna in a plot to murder his little nephew; melodramatic Melvyn Douglas is the plastic surgeon who heals Anna's face and then goes for the soul. Anna's bitterness tracks a predictable formula, but the film takes a few well placed u-turns. For one, once the unflappable Veidt refuses to flinch at the sight of Anna's scarred cheek, proffered up as a weapon against desire, she is out of the shadows for the audience as well. The story, slipping casually between underworld and bourgeois surface, allows director Cukor to underline a kind of universal hypocrisy that is a mirror for Anna's pain wherever she turns; if beauty is no assurance of goodness, the film seems to ask, why is its lack considered a disability? Moreover, Anna is ostracized, less for being disfigured than for her wish to be attractive ("What the well-dressed gargoyle will wear," someone snorts) and finally for being a beauty, presumably with the soul of a beast: "My Frankenstein," the doctor calls her, after the successful operation. The original Swedish version of A Woman's Face with Ingrid Bergman, which we showed in December, has a child's kiss transforming Anna rather completely; but Crawford, ever abrasive, never really convinces on that score. All the more powerful, then, when she says, like the Elephant Man, "I wanna belong to the human race."