Jeanne Fusier-Gir

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, and the Catholic Church, and it 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.

A Maigret-esque detective, Antoine, leaves no stone unturned in his exceedingly private investigations of the down-at-heel showbiz couple’s sad, tempestuous life.

Micheline, a young woman from the provinces, arrives in Paris to prepare for her marriage to a silk manufacturer from Lyon, Daniel Rousseau. Flush with the romance and excitement of Paris, she ends up falling in love with the best friend of her husband-to-be, the fashion designer Philippe Clarence. An unremitting womanizer, Clarence seduces her into a tempestuous liaison doomed for failure.