Le Corbeau (1943) (n/b, Criterion Collection)

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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 a spirit of paranoid pettiness and self-loathing that turns an occupied French town into a twentieh-century Salem.