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, his suspension only later lifted.

Pierre Fresnay plays the doctor at the centre of the poison-pen campaign, in a drama that refuses to grant anyone moral high ground. Clouzot directs with a cold, clinical precision that would become his signature, building dread not from violence but from the corrosive spread of suspicion — a famous scene swinging a bare lightbulb between accusers as the line between good and evil dissolves.

Attacked at the time by both the Resistance and the Vichy authorities, the film has since been recognised as a masterpiece and a piercing study of mob psychology, its relevance undimmed in any age of rumour and informing. A direct ancestor of Clouzot's later thrillers The Wages of Fear and Diabolique, it remains a bracingly cynical work — proof that the most frightening monster a community faces may be itself. Clouzot's icy precision and refusal of easy heroes feel strikingly contemporary, and the film is now studied as a key work of wartime French cinema.