Henri-Georges Clouzot's German-financed Le Corbeau occupies a unique place in film history: When it was released in Nazi-occupied France in 1943, it essentially pissed off everyone. The film's unrelenting pessimism and grim take on human nature simultaneously upset the left wing, the right wing, the Catholic Church, the Nazis, and the post-Vichy French government, which banned co-writer/director Clouzot from filmmaking for life, though it eventually reduced that ban to a mere two years. Obviously, Clouzot must have been doing something right to enrage so many people.
French cinema during Nazi occupation understandably tended toward fluff and escapism; after all, French audiences of the time didn't need to be reminded of man's inhumanity to man. Le Corbeau is the antithesis of escapism: The closest thing it has to a hero is an angry, mercurial doctor (Pierre Fresnay) who furtively performs abortions, carries on an affair with a married woman, and sleeps with her femme-fatale sister, damaged sexpot Ginette Leclerc. When a series of anonymous poison-pen letters signed "The Raven" begin hurling vicious, unverifiable rumors around town, Fresnay emerges as their chief target. But the missives soon create an avalanche effect that poisons the townsfolk's better nature and creates a fertile breeding ground for paranoia and hatred.
In just one of many subversive touches, Clouzot makes imprisonment a recurring visual motif: When a group of schoolchildren flee beyond their school's imposing gates, it looks like a pint-sized jailbreak. The small-minded townspeople are imprisoned as much by their own suspicion as by any outside force. As petty as they may be, they're all too recognizably human, especially the film's enormously flawed hero and Leclerc, whose simultaneously touching, pathetic, and hateful limping vixen wears a fierce red slash of lipstick like war paint for sexual combat. One of Clouzot's great gifts as a filmmaker and storyteller is showing mankind at its worst without sacrificing his characters' humanity or prickly humor. A battalion of French intellectual heavyweights sprang to Clouzot's defense following his banishment from filmmaking, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, but Clouzot's uncompromising film is its own most eloquent defense.