Clouzot's most notorious and dangerous film, Le Corbeau threw acid in the face of the bourgeois establishment of Vichy-era France with its vitriolic image of a small town menaced by a series of anonymous poisoned letters cruelly betraying the dark, festering secrets of its inhabitants and unleashing a black cloud of hatred and distrust. Leading a cast of sordid characters, each more disreputable than the next, Pierre Fresnay plays an adulterous doctor thrust into the eye of the scandal and turned reluctant detective, determined to catch the malicious epistolary anarchist. Misinterpreted after the war as anti-French propaganda that almost cost Clouzot his career, Le Corbeau is recognized today as a subversive knife to the very heart of collaborationist France.