Film Synopsis

A mysterious writer of poison pen letters, known only as Le Corbeau (the Raven), plagues a French provincial town, unwittingly 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, the Catholic Church, and was banned after the Liberation. But some - including Jean Cocteau and Jean - Paul Sartre - recognized the powerful subtext to Clouzot's anti - informant, anti - Gestapo fable, and worked to rehabilitate Clouzot's directorial reputation after the war. Le Corbeau brilliantly captures a spirit of paranoid pettiness and self - loathing turning an occupied French town into a twentieth - century Salem.