LE CORBEAU / THE RAVEN (78)

Directed by: Henri-Georges Clouzot (1943)

Starring: Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, Pierre Larquey

The Pitch: A small French town is ripped apart by a spate of anonymous poison-pen letters.

Theo Sez: A slight weakening towards the end (always a problem in a whodunnit) is the only flaw in this razor-sharp near-classic. It's in the tradition of KING'S ROW (and decades later, of course, BLUE VELVET), the poisonous sores festering beneath the placid surface of a small town - and it's even more effective in a French village setting, the kind of amiably argumentative community of mild eccentrics made famous, and quintessentially French, by Marcel Pagnol (except of course that their arguments are no longer very amiable, and their eccentricities have become neuroses). It's a joke the film undoubtedly appreciates, not least because it's primarily black comedy - it delights in how vicious and bad-tempered everyone is, and has a lot of fun setting the villagers against each other. Rather surprisingly, given its near-total blackness - and very daringly, for a film made during wartime - it insists on the dual nature of Man, good and evil both present and commingled in every person, adding a breath of humanism without diluting the jaundiced view of humanity : we don't see much goodness, but it remains at least a possibility. It's a wonderfully grumpy movie ; if it didn't get a little over-fussy in its final stages, with first one then another person apparently unmasked as the villain, it would be just about perfect.