Le corbeau
Henri-Georges Clouzot (1943)
Le corbeau was first released in France during the German Occupation, in late 1943, but public screenings were soon banned by the collaborationist Vichy government. Who is sending increasingly nasty and accusatory poison-pen letters, signed ‘the Raven’, in the small rural town of Saint-Robin? En route to answering that question, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s mystery drama presents a cast of dislikeable, often immoral, characters, and disparages the practice of informing on neighbours: both elements were bound to incur the Vichy regime’s disapproval. To make matters worse, and although Saint-Robin is a fictional place, Clouzot and Louis Chavance, who wrote Le corbeau with him, make clear in an opening legend that their story could be happening ‘ici ou ailleurs‘ – ‘here or elsewhere’. The Resistance press, for different reasons, objected to the film’s negative portrait of supposedly typical French citizens: besides, Le corbeau was produced through Continental Films, German-controlled and the only legally authorised film production company in operation in Nazi-occupied France. When World War II ended, Clouzot was one of several French directors tried in court for collaborating with the Germans and banned from making films in future. That ban was lifted as early as 1947 but Le corbeau would remain out of circulation for much longer. It continued to be shown within private film clubs but not publicly again in France until 1969.
The extraordinary notoriety surrounding Le corbeau runs the risk of obscuring the film itself, but it’s eminently worth seeing (in my case, worth seeing a second time). Clouzot’s brisk, icy storytelling is compelling, despite the largely unappealing human beings on the screen. The central character is Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), a medical doctor, a recent newcomer to Saint-Robin and the most frequent target of the poison pen. The letter-writer accuses Germain of carrying out illegal abortions, branding him ‘the angel-maker’, and of an adulterous affair with a married woman, Laura Vorzet (Micheline Francey) – beautiful and much younger than her psychiatrist husband Michel (Pierre Larquey). There is a mutual attraction between Laura and Germain, but his actual (ex-) lover is Denise Saillens (Ginette Leclerc), married to the principal of the local school (Noël Roquevert), who is also Germain’s landlord. Denise is sultry, sullen and walks with a limp that signals her moral shortcomings. According to the Raven, her little sister Rolande (Liliane Maigné), a young teenager, is another of Germain’s inamoratas; more evidently, Rolande is an occasional thief and persistent nosey parker. Laura’s sister is the embittered and censorious Marie Corbin (Héléna Manson), a nurse at the hospital in Saint-Robin. A patient there, François (Roger Blin), receives an anonymous letter informing him that his cancer is terminal. To the deep distress of his loving mother (Sylvie), François commits suicide. Marie thereby becomes Raven suspect number one and is sent to prison.
In what follows, and in turn, almost every one of the above-mentioned characters will appear to be the culprit. A pivotal moment arrives in church – churchgoing for most locals, unbeliever Germain a notable exception, continues, despite Saint-Robin’s epidemic of vicious paranoia. A letter from the Raven falls into the church nave from the gallery above. It’s clear that Marie has been wrongly accused, since she’s behind bars. Those standing in the gallery when the letter dropped are all subjected to an extensive handwriting test. From this point, the finger of suspicion accelerates in moving from one person to the next. These quickfire changes nearly make the final choice of Raven look arbitrary: the narrative turns into a variation on pass-the-parcel – it just depends on who’s holding the poison pen when the music stops. Is the subtext to the film’s opening warning, that the story might happen anywhere, that the guilty party might be anyone? Perhaps, but Clouzot seems to put paid to these thoughts with the final unmasking which, unlike the earlier ones, sees a kind of retributive justice being done.
Smiling faces in Le corbeau are a rarity. The few in evidence tend to be expressions of derision or dissimulation so it seems apt, too, that the last Raven is the film’s most consistently genial presence. There are times when the dramatis personae are collectively so loathsome that you almost want to laugh, but this isn’t a black comedy. It is, though, decidedly a film noir – never mind that the term wasn’t yet in use in 1943 (though it’s often applied retrospectively to Hollywood movies of the early 1940s). The combination of Clouzot’s unblinking misanthropy and Nicolas Hayer’s cinematography is a grim yet bracing reminder of black-and-white cinema’s special facility for imparting moral starkness and urgency to a story.
In his late-life diaries My Name Escapes Me (1997), Alec Guinness named Pierre Fresnay his favourite actor. Over the course of Le corbeau, you certainly come to appreciate Fresnay’s excellence. Without warming to his character, you’re fascinated by his hints throughout that there’s more to Rémy Germain than you’re being told. The eventual revelation of the doctor’s personal history, before he came to Saint-Robin, slightly humanises the story and makes complete sense of Fresnay’s expert playing. He worked more than once with Continental Films during the Occupation; once the War ended, Fresnay too was publicly vilified (and briefly imprisoned). He would soon go on to make Monsieur Vincent (1947), which Guinness singled out as his finest work, but Le corbeau was the last of several films that Fresnay made with Clouzot. That’s a pity: you wonder how much more substantial a film Les diaboliques (1955) might have been with Pierre Fresnay as its leading man.
15 January 2026