Le Corbeau [1943] [Criterion] (DVD)
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Synopsis
A mysterious writer of poison-pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a French provincial town, 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, and the Catholic Church, and was banned after the liberation. But some—including Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre—recognized the powerful subtext of Clouzot’s anti-informant, anti-Gestapo fable, and worked to rehabilitate his directorial reputation after the war. Le Corbeau brilliantly captures the paranoid pettiness and self-loathing that turn an occupied French town into a twentieth-century Salem.
Special Features:
- Interview with filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier
- Excerpts from The Story of French Cinema by Those Who Made It: Grand Illusions 1939–1942, a 1975 documentary featuring director Henri-Georges Clouzot
- Trailer
- An essay by film scholar Alan Williams
Product Details
- Language: French
- Subtitles: English
- Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
- Number of Discs: 1
- Rating: Not Rated
- Label: Criterion Collection
- Release Date: 02/17/2004
- Run Time: 91 minutes
- Catalogue #: 227
- Region: 1