Le Corbeau
Le Corbeau • 1h 31m
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1943 • France
Starring Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, Micheline Francey
A mysterious writer of poison-pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a French provincial town, unwittingly exposing the collective suspicion and rancor seething beneath the community’s calm surface. Made during the Nazi Occupation of France, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s LE CORBEAU was attacked by the right-wing Vichy regime, the left-wing Resistance press, and the Catholic Church, and it was banned after the Liberation. But some—including Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre—recognized the powerful subtext to Clouzot’s anti-informant, anti-Gestapo fable, and worked to rehabilitate Clouzot’s directorial reputation after the war. LE CORBEAU brilliantly captures a spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing turning an occupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem.
Up Next in Le Corbeau
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Bertrand Tavernier on LE CORBEAU
In 2002, French film director Bertrand Tavernier made LAISSEZ-PASSER (SAFE PASSAGE), a feature about the French film industry during the German occupation, the period in which LE CORBEAU was made. In this 2004 interview, Tavernier discusses the political subtext of the film, and why it was so mis...
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Henri-Georges Clouzot Interview Excerpts
THE STORY OF FRENCH CINEMA BY THOSE WHO MADE IT, a documentary directed by Armand Panigel and shown on French television in 1975, allowed several French filmmakers to recount their experiences in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Excerpts from an interview with LE CORBEAU director Henri-G...
