Set in the provincial French town of St. Robin (which, as an opening note informs us, could be anywhere), masterful director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 second feature—made during the collaborationist Vichy regime under the Nazi occupation—serves up an engaging mystery as well as a political subtext about informers.
The reason why Le Corbeau (The Raven) snuck past the German censors is simple: the production studio, Continental Films, was Nazi-approved by Joseph Goebbels himself, who wanted French cinema to churn out mindless and uncontroversial entertainment. But Le Corbeau is neither.
A misanthrope with a sense of humor, Clouzot—along with screenwriter Louis Chavance—puts the little village of St. Robin through proverbial hell as a veritable flood of poison-pen letters signed The Raven begin to appear in the citizenry’s mailboxes. Given the petty foibles of human nature, there is plenty of poison to go around. The unpleasantries kick off with a letter accusing Dr. Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay) of being romantically involved with Laura Vorzet (Micheline Francey), the young wife of the much older Dr. Michel Vorzet (Pierre Larquey). The charge is absolutely correct and suspicion immediately falls on nurse Marie Corbin (Héléna Manson), Laura’s sour elder sister (who was once Dr. Vorzet’s fiancée).
Aspersions continue to be cast, some regarding Dr. Germain’s shadowy background and current practice (under his care, pregnant mothers survive childbirth but their babies die—suggesting that Germain is an abortionist), while other letters target women—especially the sultry Denise Saillens (Ginette Leclerc) who is obvious in her attempts to seduce Germain. Even various corrupt schemes initiated by the town’s administrators are revealed.
Paranoia runs deep (as Buffalo Springfield would say), and residents worry over who will be the Raven’s next victim. But when someone dies due to the contents of one of the letters (a subsequent newspaper headline reads “The Ink That Made Blood Flow”), the town’s tone changes to moral outrage and in a scene reminiscent of the chase scene in Frankenstein, the mob goes looking for revenge.
In a later sequence worthy of Hercule Poirot, Dr. Vorzet rounds up the unusual suspects in a school classroom where they are made to write from dictation oodles of letters from the Raven’s 850 that were sent over the preceding two months (Vorzet hopes to make a graphological collar based on similar handwriting).
The closest Le Corbeau comes to delivering a political statement about the Nazi occupation is when Germain says that evil is sometimes a necessity and that people emerge from it stronger than before. It is the slightest sliver of hope in an otherwise dark (but also often quite funny) film.
Presented with a luminous 4K digital restoration, extras include an interview with filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, excerpts from the 1975 documentary The Story of French Cinema by Those Who Made It: Grand Illusions 1939–1942 (featuring director Henri-Georges Clouzot), and a leaflet with an essay by film scholar Alan Williams.
In the postwar roundup of collaborationists, Clouzot was banned for life from making films Le Corbeau was attacked by both the Left and the Right for being anti-French), a sentence that was only lifted in 1947 after numerous critics and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre rushed to the director’s defense. Clouzot would go on to make two of French cinema’s best-known classics: The Wages of Fear (1953) and Diabolique (1955). Le Corbeau rightfully stands as his first. Highly recommended for classic film collections in public libraries and academic libraries for film studies classrooms.