The title, A Woman's Face, resonatesthroughout this darkly atmospheric film, informing it much as a walllabel does a painting. Ingrid Bergman is cast very much against type,particularly in the first half. Her Anna Holm is a disfigured andembittered young woman whose revenge is to blackmail illicit lovers atthe peak of a happiness she can never know-because of her face. It iseffectively alienating to see Bergman in the role of Anna Holm-preciselybecause her face is not the one we were expecting. But behind thatdistorted visage and vicious personality crouches a little girl whoseworld was destroyed, and it is this role that Bergman develops mostsubtly. With classic soap-opera inevitability, the husband of one of hervictims is a plastic surgeon, but now we have a beauty amidbeasts-sinister, greedy blackmailers abound-and Anna Holm heading forthe snow country to murder a child for his inheritance. In the film'spivotal scene, a kiss from that child succeeds where a surgeon's knife(and the good doctor's interminable moralizing) failed-and Bergman (withthe help of some luminous lighting) transforms "before oureyes" in a wholly internal special effect. With the child's kiss,A Woman's Face becomes A Woman's Place-three for four in our series sofar.