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Once widely misunderstood-the director was charged with Nazi sympathies for Le corbeau and was derided by the French New Wave-the work of Henri-Georges Clouzot today looks far ahead of its time. Subsequent Clouzot films would be built on the same theme in different milieus: the entertainment underworld of Quai des Orfèvres, the mercenary imperialism of the white-knuckle adventure The Wages of Fear. His politically charged, 1943 Le corbeau was a highly controversial story of a poison-pen letter that uncovers the dirty secrets of an entire town viewed in retrospect, it’s Clouzot’s first important statement on the corruption of community. Though perhaps best known for 1955’s Gothic noir Diabolique, one of the most influential thrillers of all time and a film that Hitchcock himself admired (and wished to outdo), Clouzot first made his mark in French cinema in the 1940s. Maxim takes his new bride to Manderlay, a large country estate in Cornwall. She meets the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) in Monte Carlo, where they fall in love and get married. One of the few contemporaries of Hitchcock who gave the Master of Suspense a run for his money, Henri-Georges Clouzot dealt in misanthropic, black-humored tales of greed, jealousy, murder, immorality, and revenge. Joan Fontaine plays the unnamed narrator, a young woman who works as a companion to the well-to-do Mrs.