Le Corbeau
Henri-Georges Clouzot
(1943, PG, Optimum, DVD/Retail)

Available at last for home viewing, this masterly film noir made during the Nazi occupation of France got its director Henri-Georges Clouzot into hot water after the liberation for its alleged exposé of a corrupt, degraded nation. A controversial, ambivalent allegory about the sad behaviour of the French in the Second World War, it stars the great Pierre Fresnay as a decent doctor with a dark secret and turns on a poison-pen writer whose accusations undermine a provincial community and expose its hypocrisy. In an accompanying half-hour talk, film scholar Ginette Vincendeau places it in a historical context. Otto Preminger re-made Le Corbeau in French Canada as The 13th Letter (1951) with Charles Boyer.

&#183 To order Le Corbeau for £19.99 with free UK p&p, call 0870 836 0713