The Trial (1962)

Anthony Perkins realizes the paranoia of Joseph K, charged with an unnamed crime by uncooperative detectives and pursued by victims, executioners, and young girls through a nightmarish European city which is darker than the blackest things in horror of film noir. The terrifying,thought provoking, dreamily real picture could only have been brought to us by Orson Welles. He comes to us not only as a director, but again as an actor. Welles plays a bedridden lawyer in a cavernous house and enters in the cloud of smoke from a cigar. Romy Shneider shines as his nursemaid who seduces the lawyers clients like K and Block(Akim Tamiroff). Welles updated Kafka's THE TRIAL to the age after the holocaust and the atomic bomb. This is aided by the locations Welles was forced to shoot in after funding was cut. Edmund Richard masterfully moves his camera through the ruined interiors of a decaying industrial Europe. K's dillema is hightened by the cavernous abandoned railroad station. The picture is genius from the pinscreen opening to the spellbinding climax. Fans of THE THIRD MAN should appreciate the final scenes. Welles's best and therefore the best there is.

Fmovies: THE TRIAL is Orson Welles's version of a typical European film with all the surrealistic trappings one might expect from a work by a Fellini. The feel is very true to Kafka's works. The sets are stunning.

Anthony Perkins is perfectly cast. Welles does his usual quality acting. But it is Romy Schneider's face that lights up the screen whenever she is on. A sad reminder that she left us way too early.

I found a lot to adore in "The Trial," but just as much to furrow my brow over. The cinematography is stunning; full of visual metaphor and gorgeous composition, it's an unyielding show of movie-making expertise. Welles plays up the bleak, "no tomorrow" nature of the exterior scenes, the structured chaos of the workplace and the hedonistic excess exhibited by the various stages of the trial itself, each to great effect. The story, though, feels too flighty and nebulous for my taste. It should come as no surprise, being a translation of a Kafka novel, that the entire picture often feels surreal and confusing. It continuously floats and sputters just beyond the grasp of understanding, like a moth delicately avoiding a set of flailing hands. The premise may have been established nicely during the slightly more straightforward opening scenes, but as the duration grows it becomes too ambitiously ambiguous for its own good.

The Trial fmovies. Like many of Orson Welles films, The Trial has been imitated by other filmmakers. Patrick McGoohan borrowed part of The Trial's interiors for the famous opening of "The Prisoner", and David Lynch borrowed part of the exteriors for "Eraserhead". Neither, however, approaches the relentlessly grim paranoia of the Welle's original.

I don't believe that Kafka ever published The Trial during his lifetime. In his will he left instructions that all his literary manuscripts should be destroyed after his death. In what was, perhaps, the final irony of Kafka's life, it was only the disobedience of the executor of the writer's estate that made the peculiarly paranoid world Kafka had created available to the public at all.

See this film and, afterwords, try to get a peaceful night's sleep.

Orson Welles' film version of Kafka's "The Trial" is a perfectly fine 'visualization' of the book but it still doesn't work. Perhaps this was one book that should never have been filmed, not even by Welles, unless perhaps in animated form. Kafka's world, particularly the one in which Josef K finds himself, exists more in the reader's imagination rather than in any real tangible place and it's filled with characters who are never flesh-and-blood. The problem any film version has to overcome is how to translate than imaginary world and these characters into something that, at least, seems real and into something 'recognizable'. Welles doesn't do that; rather he transfers Kafka's text onto a series of Wellsian images and does it rather badly. It looks great, of course (DoP Edmond Richard) but the acting is very uneven, (it's another of Welles' 'international' projects with an international cast). Anthony Perkins makes Josef K a very fussy prima donna with whom we can have no sympathy; consequently his nightmare predicament never seems more than just a bad dream and the sooner he wakes from it the better for him and for us. Even Welles himself, playing the Advocate, can't lift the film while the dubbing of most of the cast and the post-synchronization is very poor.

When asked on the IMDb poll to enter the name of my favorite movie, I at first thought it an impossible task. Once this one entered my mind, though, the contest was over.

The lifetime masterpiece of a master of filmmaking, "The Trial" is Orson Welles's finest film, even surpassing "Touch of Evil." Somber, brooding, sometimes even claustrophobic, "The Trial" is a surrealistic safari through the worlds of law, employment and interpersonal relationships.

The melancholy strains of the artistically deployed Adagio by Albinoni underscore the mood of the film, shot mostly at twilight or indoors by night in a tangle of nightmarish sets that extend to infinity. Even scenes shot in broad daylight seem cold and devoid of nourishment in this cosmos of interminable, infinitesimal complexity which utterly lacks a heart.

Anthony Perkins (Joseph K.) is mass of contradictions, at once sympathetic, boyish, paranoid, angry, declamatory and most of all surpassingly frustrated by the futility of attempting to deal with a society that both demands mechanistic perfection of him and at the same time exhibits a persistent apathy toward his continued existence as well as a bureaucratic attempt to destroy it.

He seems inadvertently to hurt everyone with whom he comes in contact, ostensibly the cause of people getting thrown out of their dwellings, schools, jobs, marriages and other situations, all due to his benign actions which in any sane world would be completely unconnected with the tragedies they somehow appear to create. But in the Kafka/Welles society, they just lead to blame and further accusations. In his helplessness, his innocence and his utter bafflement, Perkins is thoroughly disarming.

Welles is positively diabolical as The Advocate, who, like everyone else connected with the Court, is not of any assistance or support to the accused. Rather, he seems to exist only to hurl vague accusations at Joseph K. - which the poor man is somehow expected to understand beforehand and even think are justified - and to exact payment for same.

Romy Schneider is outstanding as The Advocate's cook/housekeeper/nursemaid/concubine, the only person in the story who shows Joseph K. any genuine affection, odd though the form it takes may be. Other unforgettable and universally strange characters populate this odyssey into oblivion, such as the club-footed landlady doggedly dragging a trunk along an empty railroad track into the fading twilight while politely trying to refrain from telling Joseph K. how lowly she regards him.

The movie is fairly divergent from the book, which it inspired me to read. For example, the movie comes to a conclusion, while the unfinished book does not. In most ways, though, I find the movie more memorable, haunting and downright disturbing. Its skillfully crafted mesh of images and symbols which resonate at a level deeper than the conscious will find themselves recurring to the viewer unbidden for years to come.