The Trial (1993)

Very acceptable DVD transfer of Welles' most neglected works
No doubt Welles enthusiasts will be compelled to purchase the Milestone edition of perhaps Kafka's greatest work adapted for the screen, but for the casual fan of Welles and those interested in Tony Perkins' early film work before he was so unfortunately typecast after Hitch's "Psycho," this film is a highly successful realization of the nighmarish world only Kafka could envision. About a man who is arrested, tried and eventually executed without even knowing his crime, Perkins is memorable as Josef K, the timid and confused clerk whose protestations against his accusers fall upon deaf ears (the scene in the giant courtroom with hundreds of extras packed in is most memorable).

With Welles in the rather minor role as the Advocate and featuring familiar castmates Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli, and old favorite Akim Tamiroff ("Touch of Evil"), viewing this unsettling and disturbing vision is not only unique and moody, but an exercise in camera technique whereas Welles throws everything but the kitchen sink at the viewer to make Josef K's nightmare the audience's own through the use of elaborately staged sets--for example, Josef K's office with a sea of desks with his fellow worker drones and their typewriters clacking away, the Belle Epoque railway station in Paris, and other baroque yet abandoned buildings in what is today's Czech Republic.

Welles' totalitarian state is painstakingly visualized with each scene as the film moves forward to its eventual conclusion and K's execution. With pinscreen animations narrated by Welles himself the parable of "The Law" becomes all too familiar and real to the situation faced by K in the remainder of the film. At the time this film was made, only a genius like Welles could pull this off and make the film believable and, at the same time, a work of cinematic art.

While this DVD transfer is, by no means remarkable, it is for avid Welles fans and newcomers to his work, another opportunity to discover the gifts this director/actor gave to the art of film.

Welles's best work...beats Kane by miles....
Mr. Welles said this was the best film he ever made, and I'm inclined to agree with him. It has some of the most amazing camera work and mise en scene I've ever seen in a film. The photography takes Welles's deep focus black and white cinematography to new levels, way beyond anything in Citizen Kane. Kane is a great film, but I really like this film more. It's much darker, incredibly ambiguous, and the feel of it is superb. It's like a nightmare that you can't get out of. I really like the scenes where Joseph K works. There are almost a 100 desks at this factory like structure, and he is absolutely no one. The labyrnith that K gets caught in is one of his own making in many ways. This film is almost Felliniesque in a way, except it's much darker than the maestro's work. It's the most surreal of Welles's work, and it gets more and more fascinating as time progresses. It's a shame that most people don't know about it, but hopefully someday.

Perkins' best performances in a strong showing from Welles.
The Trial (Orson Welles, 1963)

The going wisdom for the last forty or so years seems to be that Anthony Perkins' star shone brightest as Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho. I say give Perkins any decent director and he'd have acted his little heart out; in fact, as Joseph K., the main character in Orson Welles' adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, he turned in, I believe, a superior performance to that he'd given for Hitch three years earlier.

Welles, as was his wont when dealing with classic literature, ran somewhat roughshod over Kafka's source material, but what he came up with was as fine as anything else Welles ever did. It's The Trial in the post-McCarthy world, a weird blend of jazz hipster-ism, Cold War hysteria, and Kafka's own fine-tuned paranoid fantasy. In adapting the novel to his own ends, Welles does erase some of the novel's ambiguity (there's never a time in the original novel when one is entirely certain of Joseph K.'s innocence), but he replaces it with a firmer hand in depicting the change in Joseph K.'s character, the fact that K. only truly becomes a criminal, and a threat to society, once the system has tagged him as a criminal. Perkins portrays this change with the sort of shaky solidity that made him such a perfect casting decision in Psycho; here, he starts off the same nervous-nellie type we experience when we first see him in the office at Bates Motel, but by the end of the movie, he's become much more self-assured, if still confused as to what it is, exactly, they believe he's done. (By that time, of course, he's done a great deal, and so the point becomes rather moot.)

Wonderful, as with most Wellesiana. ****