Henri-Georges Clouzot : war fortunes and...

When war rages, opportunity may knock. On would-be filmmakers’ doors too.

During WW2, major directors fled Nazi-occupied France : Renoir, Clair, Duvivier.... Others stayed but were forbidden to work for all too clear reasons.

Life was nevertheless to go on and films to be made : so, many holes had to be filled.

Before the war, Henri-Georges Clouzot was a screenwriter. With war, he graduated to film direction.

His second movie created enormous turmoil, not because it was great.

« Le corbeau » (1943) portrays a provincial French town plagued with a mysterious « corbeau » : a crow or raven, and the French nickname for a writer of poison pen letters.

At a time when anonymous letters denounced Jews and underground fighters, it was difficult not to watch the film as a parable of Nazi-occupied France.

It was equally difficult to believe the film had been produced by Continental Films, a production company set up in Paris by the Germans and headed by Alfred Greven, a former UFA production manager, who had been appointed by Josef Goebbels.

To this day, what Continental Films was truly about and after remains of source of vigorous controversy and its story was the subject of Bertrand Tavernier's « Laissez-passer » (2002).

According to one school of thought, Alfred Greven was a film lover and an astute producer much more than a Nazi doll and pulled an impressive job : with a mix of charm and double talk, he both enticed the French film community to work with him and placated his Berlin masters’ desires for ideology-correct fare.

He may have skated on very thin ice and sometimes appeared to turn himself into a German « collaborationist », colluding with French filmmakers against his official mandate. As war wore on -and matters more pressing than French film production arose-, he seems to have convinced his running officers to grant him free rein.

Why « Le corbeau » escaped Nazi censorship and how Greven sold the project to Berlin became clear when the film was released in Germany as a picture of French moral baseness and decay.

Watched today, « Le corbeau » is an outstanding « film noir » : one of the darkest depictions ever of small town evil and meanness, with none of the ironic smile of Chabrol’s « La fleur du mal » and its comparatively harmless anonymous political tract to dilute them.

« Le corbeau » is a true psychological thriller and the precursor of modern day serial killer movies : Clouzot’s « corbeau » needs no gun or knife to murder, or injure forever, he does so with his pen and takes such pathological pleasure in it that the flow of letters cannot but grow to a fateful climax.

But « Le corbeau »’s victims are seldom innocent, this is where the film escapes all contemporary clichés and reassuring moral : he lays bare the town intimate and very real ugliness.

Though a screenwriter by trade, Clouzot did not write the film script or dialogues ; instead, he demonstrates a director’s true skills : the eye to tell a story with images and a talent with actors.

In the best « film noir » tradition, the movie black and white cinematography gives to see and feel evil at work and the town oppressive atmosphere.

As the outsider, newly arrived physician and first recipient of the letters, Pierre Fresnay gives another wonderfully restrained performance of elegant coolness, much closer to « Grand Illusion »’s « capitaine » de Boieldieu than to Pagnol’s Marius.

Just as Simenon’s Maigret is a « commissaire », but would have been a medical doctor, Fresnay’s Dr. Germain doubles as the investigator : the town is sick, it is case for a physician, rather than for the police.

As France was liberated, « Le corbeau » and those associated to the film became easy targets, if not stool pigeons and scapegoats. The movie drew a picture of France so dark that nobody could accept it at a time when the myth of a « resistant » country was being created.

Clouzot’s guilt was three-fold : he came out of the war in an better position than he had entered it ; he had run Continental Films’ screenwriting department ; he had shot a film of anti-French propaganda.

During two years and a half, Clouzot was blacklisted but remained free. Some were not so lucky : Pierre Fresnay and Ginette Leclerc, her partner in « Le corbeau », went to jail.

But, while the supply of food and commodities eventually returned to normal, talent remained scarce : the director and his actors ultimately resumed their careers.