Le Corbeau

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau (1943) is one of the most controversial films in French history, made during the Occupation for the German-controlled studio Continental Films. Its acid portrait of a town devouring itself through anonymous denunciation cut so close to the bone of collaborationist France that Clouzot was banned from directing after the Liberation, a suspension that was only later lifted.

Pierre Fresnay plays the doctor at the centre of the poison-pen campaign, in a drama that grants nobody the moral high ground. Clouzot directs with the cold, clinical precision that would become his signature, and he builds the dread out of suspicion and the corrosive way it spreads; in one famous scene a bare lightbulb swings between accusers as the line between good and evil dissolves.

Both the Resistance and the Vichy authorities attacked it at the time. It has since been recognised as a piercing study of mob psychology, and it has lost none of its relevance in any age of rumour and informing. It is a direct ancestor of Clouzot's later thrillers The Wages of Fear and Diabolique, and it is bracingly cynical, with its suggestion that the most frightening monster a community faces may be itself. Clouzot's icy precision and his refusal of easy heroes feel strikingly contemporary, and the film is now studied as a key work of wartime French cinema.