Le Corbeau

Aroview: Fascinating as a wartime allegory made under the German Occupation of France, a small town becomes a hot-bed of paranoia following a rash of poison-pen letters from the pseudonymous hand of “The Raven”.

At the centre of this unwanted attention, an upstanding community doctor (played by the great Pierre Fresnay) finds his reputation under siege while he is teased into a moral compromise by both the town hussy and a married nurse.

Politically loaded and spiked with some gloriously barbed dialogue, this dark melodrama announced its director as a visionary poet and France’s “master of suspense”.

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