Le Corbeau

Written by Joe D on July 23rd, 2010

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Here’s a film that got made in France under Nazi occupation and was a veiled attack on fascism. Nevertheless it got it’s director, Henri-Georges Clouzot in hot water. Critics wanted him arrested for collaboration, banned from filmmaking, executed! He was judged by a panel of “experts” that never even saw his film. The affair Clouzot was a scandal and many notable French filmmakers came to Clouzot’s defense including Jean Renoir and Jean Pierre Melville. Clouzout was vindicated and directed many classic films after the war but I think Le Corbeau is his best film. Made under extremely difficult circumstances and by all accounts an unpleasant experience for all who worked on it, it emerges from the troubled waters of creation a masterpiece like Venus rising from the foam of a tempest tossed sea. If you look carefully at the Marquee in Inglorious Basterds you will see Le Corbeau is showing at the Parisian theater the heroine runs.