Clouzot directed the controversial 1943 film Le Corbeau, in which the residents of a charming little French anywheresville turn against one another after someone who signs off as “The Raven” begins sending letters alerting folk to their spouses’ acts of adultery, business partners’ fraudulent dealings, their pharmacists’ drug-stealing, and accusing the local doctor of performing (illegal) abortions. (Otto Preminger later remade it as The 13th Letter.)
Here is a scene (un-subtitled; I looked) from near the end of the film, in which the protagonist, the widower Dr. Rémy Germain, finds an unsent letter signed by the Raven on the desk of his girlfriend, Denise Saillens. It reads, “My dearest surgeon, the time is ripe for an operation: Denise is pregnant with your child. Did you know?” While he hides, Denise enters the room, addresses an envelope to Germain, and seals it. When he confronts her, she denies being the Raven, claiming tearfully that she has written only this one letter, and that she did it because she knew no other way to tell him that she is pregnant. “Je vais avoir un enfant de cette demi-folle?” says German, angrily. He even threatens her with an abortion: “Non. Je veux pas d’un fils taré. Le Corbeau a raison.” The conversation gets at the meaning of evidence, perception, and the nature of guilt. Denise implores him to look into her eyes, to truly look at her, so that he might know that she is innocent. But Germain, in the film’s emotional climax, says he doesn’t know. He can’t know. He needs some more tangible proof than a look. Romantic ideas of human behavior don’t cut it, in France in 1943.
It is most emphatically not made explicit, or even really alluded to in the film — which was financed by a German-French production company, again, in 1943 — but I always saw the unsavoury developments that unfold as a metaphor for Pétainisme and the culture of denunciation and collaboration that it spawned. And the film was in fact suppressed by the Vichy government. But the underground Résistance press, too, objected, and condemned Le Corbeau as a vicious and inaccurate portrait of the ordinary French people as immoral, spineless, and conniving — Nazi propaganda in disguise. After the war, Clouzot was tried as a collaborator for making a film with German backing, found guilty, and banned from film-making for two years. It would have been for life, but for the interventions of dozens of actors, directors, and writers, including Marcel Carné, Jean Cocteau, and Jean-Paul Sartre. So thanks to them, we got the whole 1947-1960 Clouzot golden period: Quai des Orfèvres, The Wages of Fear, Diabolique, La Prisonnière, and all the other films that will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art’s series. It runs from December 8-24.
