| "He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool."
There are plenty of fools and cowards in director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (France, 1943), the infamous film noir that eventually led its director to be blacklisted from filmmaking at the end of the Second World War.
Interestingly, when it first appeared, the film was almost universally reviled in France, giving offence to both Resistance freedom fighters and their Nazi-supported enemies in the Vichy government – never mind the officials in the Catholic Church, who were undoubtedly put off by the film’s frank portrayal of adultery. For the misanthropic Clouzot, it might have seemed a victory of sorts to see so many culottes in a twist, but he was later punished for his impudence. After the Liberation, Clouzot was banned from working as a director for two years, officially because he was judged to have been a Nazi collaborator for his tenure with the German-run Continental Films – but surely Le Corbeau, in particular, contributed to the length and severity of his sentence.
Curiously, the film is not set during the Second World War, even though it satirizes the mentality that led to an atmosphere of self-destructive mistrust during the German occupation of France. A thinly veiled parable, Le Corbeau explores the paranoid atmosphere that develops in a peaceful provincial village after townspeople start receiving poison pen letters signed by someone known only as "Le Corbeau." Not long afterward, almost everyone begins using this convenient nom de plume to write their own nasty letters exposing the dirty secrets of their friends and neighbours.
No wonder so many French people were furious – Clouzot had essentially exposed them as hypocrites by suggesting an obvious parallel between the village in the film and an occupied France in which informers from all sides were ratting each other out faster than you could chain-smoke a pack of Gitanes.
Yet, despite its status as a satire and cautionary tale, Le Corbeau doesn’t scrimp on the details of scenario and character. The film delivers a wickedly tangled and suspenseful plot in which the debonair brain surgeon Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay) is discovered having an affair with Laura (Micheline Francey), the beautiful young wife of aging psychologist Dr. Vorzet (Pierre Larquey). The soap gets worked into an even zestier lather when Laura dumps Germain out of fear her husband will discover them, and Germain takes up with bedridden cripple Denise (Ginette Leclerc), much to the chagrin of teenaged Rolande (Liliane Maigné), who’s also sweet on the good doctor. But who among them is Le Corbeau? Well, by the time we discover that even the nun, Laura’s sister Marie (Héléna Manson), has a few skeletons in her closet, everyone is under suspicion – not just from one another, but from the audience as well.
As each of them is shown to be, to one degree or another, a self-interested turncoat, it’s occasionally hard to believe Le Corbeau raised such a furor in its homeland, but obviously its pessimistic view of human nature struck a nerve among a French populace sensitive to criticism of this sort. Ultimately, a public outcry from the intelligentsia, in particular Jean-Paul Sartre, was required to save the film’s reputation.
It would take some effort to show people that Le Corbeau’s non-partisan attack on societal mores was something not to be vilified but celebrated. Even then, the opening title card, which sets the film in "a village, here or anywhere," could be seen as Clouzot’s attempt to dodge responsibility for a direct indictment of French hypocrisy during the occupation. But it’s really what he’s saying about human nature in general that should be remembered most – people everywhere are fools and cowards, all of them. |
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