Le Corbeau Film Still

Le Corbeau

Henri-Georges Clouzot

France

1943

91 minutes

Black and White

1.33:1

French

227

Synopsis

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, the Catholic Church, and 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.

Cast

Dr. Remy GermainPierre Fresnay
Denise SaillensGinette Leclerc
Laura VorzetMicheline Francey
Dr. Michel VorzetPierre Larquey
Nurse Marie CorbinHéléna Manson
Rolande SaillensLiliane Maigné
School Director SaillensNoël Roquevert
MotherSylvie

Credits

DirectorHenri-Georges Clouzot
Director of photographyNicholas Hayer
Production DesignAndré Andrejew
ScreenplayLouis Chavance
Adaptation and dialogue byHenri-Georges Clouzot and Louis Chavance
MusicTony Aubin

Disc Features

  • New digital transfer, with restored image and sound
  • Video interview with Bertrand Tavernier, director of Coup de torchon
  • Excerpts from The Story of French Cinema by Those Who Made It: Grand Illusions 1939 – 1942, a 1975 documentary featuring Henri-Georges Clouzot
  • New essay by film scholar Alan Williams, author of Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • Optimal image quality: RSDL dual-layer edition

From the Current

TORONTO DISPATCH: CLOUZOT LOST AND FOUND

by Michael Koresky Sep 23, 2009

One enters any major film festival with hopes of discovering a budding auteur, a new voice from some previously unheard-from . . .

Le Corbeau

by Alan Williams Feb 16, 2004

For most of its history, French cinema has undergone periodic upheavals characterized by massive changes in many areas—personnel, economics, typical film style and content, and so on. The German occupation resulted in perhaps the most striking of these points of rupture. In personnel, some men . . .

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Available Editions

Le Corbeau Criterion DVD Add to Cart

DVD

1 Disc

SRP: $29.95

Criterion Store price

$18.96