Review(s): DVD Le Corbeau (The Raven) - Criterion Collection
The Raven Never More
There is one thing that the French do better than almost any country, they produce first class cinema. Le Corbeau (The Raven) is no exception. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot makes a fine film from a popular novel about real poison pen strife in Tulane France during Vichy France in the early 40's.
The first thing an American would notice about the film, there are references, nay, there are actual scenes of passion and sex, clothed, but obvious between Pierre Fresnay of the pencil mustache and Ginette Leclerc of the lacquered lips in a 1943 film. It's subdued, and the biting of the hand scene is a little pulpy, but these folks want to do it. Americans would have to wait for Bogart and Bacall before they got some steam.
Since the Nazi's were essentially in control of France at the time, they thought an anti-informant film a bad idea. They hated it, but the French audience's ground down by what was essentially a military defeat and then an occupation, were thrilled by the tension and mystery of Le Corbeau. There are many secrets about the townspeople that complicate life in this tense little town until the culprit has a comeuppance. There are a number of classic original scenes like the light bulb scene or the avenging angel scene. This one holds up very well.
"All moral values have been corrupted."
Henri-Georges Clouzot's film, "Le Corbeau" is set in the French village, St. Robin. The town appears peaceful, but life is disrupted when anonymous poison pen letters begin to appear. The spiteful letters are signed "Le Corbeau" or "The Raven", and outsider, Dr Germain (Pierre Fresnay) is a main target. Within 2 months, 850 letters are received by various townspeople. Some of the letters are accusations of adultery. Some of the letters are accusations of theft. No one is safe from the prying eyes of the mean-spirited letter writer.
The villagers vacillate back and forth between suspects, and they even form a mob at one point in an attempt to silence the suspected letter writer. One official has the brilliant idea that if they could just get rid of Dr. Germain, then perhaps the problem would just go away.
Accusations are met with counter accusations. Everyone is a suspect. The villagers watch their neighbours, and the atmosphere of distrust builds to unbearable proportions. Ultimately it doesn't matter if the accusations are lies, rumours or true. The damage is done, paranoia reigns, and the social structure of the town is ripped apart.
The film emphasizes the idea that there are no normal relationships in this fundamentally unpleasant town. A conspiracy of silence exists regarding the activities of Dr. Germain, who--it's rumoured--specializes in "relieving vulnerable women of unwanted burdens." Dr. Germain--a man with a secret past--has relationships with two women--Laura (Micheline Francey) the lonely wife of a much older doctor, and the crippled, jealous, and frustrated, Denise (Ginette Leclerc).
"Le Corbeau" was made during the German occupation of France, and the film is a thinly veiled criticism of the Vichy regime. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot was banned for life from French cinema for making this film, but he returned to film a few years later when the political climate in France changed. The black and white film is excellent quality, and film buffs will find it worthwhile to watch this subversive film that managed to alienate all sides of the French political spectrum. In French with English subtitles--displacedhuman
Lies and deceit are a plague among us
"Beware! I see all and tell all." So quoth the Raven, the pen name of the mysterious writer of poison pen letters that has plagued a small town in France with suspicion, fear and anxiety. Since this film was made by a Frenchman under a German controlled studio during Nazi occupied France in 1943, there is a subtext not necessarily explicit in the film itself, but nonetheless pervades its very essence. In Le Corbeau, Dr. Remy Germain becomes a victim when letters start circulating that accuse him of having an affair with a married woman and of being an abortionist. Both of these accusations are false but do contain half-truths, and it is the unfortunate tendency for groups of people, usually motivated by fear, to assume the worst. Furthermore, Germain is an outsider, in that he refuses to participate in gossip and avoids social clicks, which ironically makes him a target. Soon he will find himself under suspicion and alienated. Since virtually every member of the community has some skeleton in their closet, they would much rather turn their ire on the accused than risk having their own affairs aired by The Raven. And so the drama escalates to a crisis where Clouzot does not even spare the victim of blame. By assuming a position of detachment, Germain has turned a blind eye and thereby contributing to ignorance which only provides fuel for the Raven and the lies and deceit spread like a plague.
Related DVD's Le Corbeau (The Raven) - Criterion Collection
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $8.98YOU SAVE $6!
Buy it
The long-awaited emergence of Nightmare Alley into the light of DVD should achieve two things: make a legendary film noir available to a new generation, and restore the horrific charge to the lately watered-down term geek, a concept that once had the power to give people very bad dreams indeed.
To his lasting credit, Tyrone Power--20th Century Fox's extraordinarily handsome but not terribly interesting star of the '30s and '40s--begged for the chance to play Stan Carlisle, the predatory charmer who snakes his way through this bracingly unwholesome story. A spieler for--and lover of--carnival mind reader Zeena (Joan Blondell), he displays uncanny skill at "reading" the susceptible rubes, including a tough sheriff who turns to jelly after Stan psychs him out. Once Stan's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Tyrone Power - Joan Blondell - Coleen Gray Director(s): Edmund Goulding DVD Release Date: Released the 07 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $11.98YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
Film noir is such a rich cinematic zone that second-tier specimens compel nearly as much fascination as the classics. At a glance, Volume 2 of Warner Bros.' (ever-expanding, we hope) Film Noir Collection is a distinct step down from Volume 1--inevitable when you've launched your series with five landmark titles, including three outright noir masterpieces (The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past). But linger beyond that first glance, because the second set is a flavorful mix of sleazoid iconography (two vehicles for B-movie bad boy Lawrence Tierney), an offbeat outing for a major director (Fritz Lang in his Howard Hughes RKO period), Poverty Row production circumstances that encourage aggressively peculiar, verging-on-radical filmmaking (the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Claire Trevor DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $49.92 Your Price: $39.94YOU SAVE $9.98!
Buy it
An amazingly effective film noir action movie, shot on location in New Orleans in 1950, that has twists of plot and explosions of violence that can still make audiences gasp. Elia Kazan, of all people, directed this story of a public health worker (Richard Widmark) and a police detective (Paul Douglas) who have only a few hours in which to capture some fleeing felons who may be infected with the plague. The bad guys are played, with enormous relish, by Jack Palance and Zero Mostel, the latter only a few years before Kazan ratted him out to the House Un-American Activities Committee. In retrospect, this modest crime picture looks like a crucial turning point in the formation of Kazan's distinctive style, a clear precursor to the blistering location work of landmark films like On the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Widmark - Paul Douglas - Barbara Bel Geddes - Jack Palance Director(s): Elia Kazan DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $13.48YOU SAVE $1.5!
Buy it
François Truffaut's 1968 thriller was an attempt to reconcile the exclusive experience of the Hitchcockian hero with the expansiveness of Jean Renoir's view of flawed humanity. Jeanne Moreau stars as a newlywed whose husband is shot dead on the church steps following their wedding. The story then follows her systematic and relentless efforts to track down the men who were involved in the killing, murdering each one with a creative efficiency that Truffaut does not mean for us to take too seriously. The film's real point is the interesting tension between the audience's growing knowledge about and sympathy toward the guilty fellows, who really are rather ordinary people, and the narrative hook concerning the heroine's reinvention into a figure of insulated emotion and revenge.... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Moreau - Jean-Claude Brialy Director(s): François Truffaut DVD Release Date: Released the 23 January 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.95 Your Price: $13.46YOU SAVE $1.49!
Buy it
