Le Corbeau (1943) - film review

The peace of the small French town of Saint-Robin is disturbed by a sudden outbreak of poison pen letters, which cast vile aspersions on prominent members of the community.  The identity of the letter writer remains a mystery - the venomous missives are written in a disguised hand and signed Le Corbeau (The Raven).  Dr Germain, the town’s respected gynaecologist, is accused of performing illegal abortions and of having an affair with Laura Vorzet, the young wife of one of his colleagues, the psychiatrist Dr Vorzet.  Matters come to a head when a hospital patient commits suicide after receiving one of the letters, which states he has terminal cancer.  The nurse Marie Corbin is thought to be the culprit when a letter from Le Corbeau falls from her wreath at her patient’s funeral.  Amid a public uproar, the nurse is arrested and the letters stop coming - for a while.  When a second wave of poison pen letters begins, Dr Germain begins to suspect Denise, the hypochondriac sister of the town’s schoolmaster.  Once Denise has convinced Germain of her innocence, the finger of suspicion points towards the least likely suspect, Laura, but things are not what they seem.  Meanwhile, the mother of the hospital suicide is hunting Le Corbeau, having resolved that her son’s death should be avenged...

Is there a film that is more intensely evocative of France under German Occupation than Le Corbeau, the second and most notorious film to be directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot?  Through its starkly realist portrayal of a small provincial community being propelled into a maelstrom of fear and suspicion by a spate of malicious denouncements, Le Corbeau paints the most vivid and corrosive picture of Nazi-controlled France.  Today it is easy to see the film for what it is - a flagrant assault on the virulent tell-on-thy-neighbour malaise that blighted France during the Occupation, but at the time of its release in 1943 it was extremely ill-received.  The film’s most vociferous detractors were, bizarrely, the high-minded intellectuals of the Resistance, who characterised it as anti-French German propaganda.  Paradoxically, the German film censors were just as appalled by the film - finding it immoral and depressing, they forbade its release in Nazi Germany.

After the Liberation, Le Corbeau was banned outright in France, whilst its director was forbidden ever to make another film again.  Fortunately, both interdictions were lifted in 1947, and Clouzot was able to resume his career with another landmark thriller, Quai des Orfèvres, through the support of the actor Louis Jouvet.  Clouzot was just one of many employees of Continental Films, the German-run company which made Le Corbeau, to be blacklisted after the Liberation.  Some - including the film’s stars Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc - were imprisoned for alleged collaboration with the Nazis.  It is indeed ironic and tragic that the one film to accurately record the mood of occupied France should be censured as if it were the work of the Devil.  Evidently, the truth of the Occupation was not one that France was yet ready to face up to.   More than half a century on, Le Corbeau is widely considered to be a masterpiece of French cinema, arguably the greatest film to be made in France during the Occupation.  The film was later remade in America as The 13th Letter (1951), directed by Otto Preminger and starring Charles Boyer and Linda Darnell - needless to say, this isn’t a patch on the original.

One of the central ironies of Le Corbeau is that it was a film which no one really wanted to make, and it would probably have never seen the light of day if the German overseers at Continental had been doing their job properly.   The film’s screenplay (first titled L’Oeil du serpent) was originally written by Louis Chavance in 1937, based on a widely publicised real-life poison pen case which took place in the French town of Tulle in 1917 (perpetrated by a frustrated spinster, Angèle Laval).  (The same incident had previously inspired Richard Llewellyn’s play Poison Pen, which was adapted as a British film under the same title in 1939 and may also have been the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s novel The Moving Finger, first published in 1942).  Chavance wrote the script for La Société des auteurs du films, whose producers sat on it for several years, fearing that its subject may be too grim for the period.   Continental Films inherited the script and saw no harm in putting it into production.  Having proven himself to be a very capable director with his first film, L’Assassin habite au 21 (1942), Henri-Georges Clouzot was assigned to direct the film, despite his misgivings about it.  The production of Le Corbeau proved to be a fraught experience for just about everyone involved.   Clouzot’s perfectionism and lack of sensitivity quickly alienated the director from his cast and crew, and filming was repeatedly held up by rows and resignation threats.  Fresnay loathed working with Clouzot and was never at ease throughout the entire shoot.   It may have been the lack of support he received whilst making this film that drove Clouzot to storm out of Continental just before its release.  

The film’s traumatic production could be what makes Le Corbeau such a singularly disturbing piece of cinema, the strained off-screen tensions somehow permeating into the finished product to give it an unrelenting atmosphere of barely contained menace.   There is no comfort whatever to be drawn from the film’s familiar setting, a seemingly idyllic rural town populated by the usual character types.  From the very outset, you cannot help sensing that something twisted and malignant is lurking behind the semblance of calm and conformity.  Every character has a sinister mystique, a subtle whiff of malevolence.  Anyone and everyone may be the mysterious letter writer, and none of them is to be trusted.  Even the seemingly irreproachable Dr Germain - Pierre Fresnay at his ambiguous best - is soon revealed to have dark secrets and may not be what he seems.  As the climate of mistrust and fear grows, like a spreading contagion, it looks increasingly as though Le Corbeau may not be an individual but a manifestation of group hysteria, a coalescence of repressed loathing and evil intent which has the power to tear the once happy little community to pieces.

The film’s key scene is the one in which Vorzet and Germain, the town’s two revered doctors, meet in an empty classroom and discuss the psychology of the mysterious letter writer.  Vorzet (superbly played by Pierre Larquey, arguably the character actor’s finest performance) is amazed by Germain’s simpleminded view of good and evil and scorns his manichean naivety by pointing to a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling.  As he sets the glowing bulb swinging like a pendulum, causing shadows to dance menacingly around the protagonists, Vorzet asks simply: "Où est l’ombre? Où est la lumière?" (Where is the darkness?  Where is the light?)  Germain has to confront a terrible truth about human nature - evil has no well-defined frontier; good and evil exist in everyone.  In the film’s brilliantly constructed and totally shocking climax our certainties are further shaken when we realise that Le Corbeau may not be a flesh-and-blood character.  It may instead be a spirit that passes from one form to another, one minute a twisted creature that writes poison pen letters, the next the raven-like silhouette of an old woman who has wreaked a just vengeance.  As in Clouzot’s subsequent Les Diaboliques, we are left with the distinct impression that evil has been exposed but not vanquished - like a bacteria or virus, malignancy lingers in the air, waiting for the recrudescence that will surely come...

© James Travers 2011

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