Orson Welles (1962)
[Two impressions of the film, from viewings nine years apart]
Take 1
Orson Welles’s The Trial may be some distance away from Franz Kafka but this is a compelling and largely coherent revision of the book. From the start, Welles imposes his own voice on the material, literally and brilliantly. In a prologue, he reads Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ parable (which features in the novel, as Welles’s voiceover acknowledges). The superb reading accompanies extraordinary animated illustrations, created by the ‘pin screen’ artist Alexandre Alexeïeff. The lighting (by Edmond Richard) and the production design in what follows are hardly less impressive. This updating of Kafka is set in a world both surreal and strongly contemporary: there are images that express concentration camp deprivation and humiliation, of a totalitarian state living in the shadow of a mushroom cloud. The places of the film are remarkable creations – from the soulless apartment block in which Josef K lives and the surrounding waste land to the vast scale of his workplace, filled with hundreds of human cogs, and the packed, tiered courthouse for his trial.
The characterisations are less successful. Casting Anthony Perkins as a trembling victim might seem a good idea in theory but he isn’t right as a rising bureaucrat – a man who had an ordinary life until the story began. Perkins’s extraordinary physique means that, for all the ingenuity of the design, his K isn’t sufficiently oppressed by the architecture of his nightmare. And he’s in such a neurotic lather from the start that it’s not surprising the agents of the state have come to arrest Josef K. (This isn’t just the ghost of Norman Bates clinging to Perkins: his dynamic twitchiness suggests K has a hundred guilty secrets.) Welles changes the profession of K’s neighbour from the typist she is in the novel to a night-club entertainer but this doesn’t help Jeanne Moreau, who evidently doesn’t get the hang of what she’s meant to be doing. Arnoldo Foà is subtly menacing as Inspector A but his sidekicks are screen heavies, their impact reduced by their familiarity.
31 July 2015
Take 2
In fact, not so much ‘Take 2’ as ‘Part 2’ – the earlier note refers only to the early bits of the film …
The phrase ‘the logic of a dream’ in the ‘Before the Law’ parable seems to have been essential to Orson Welles’s approach. His film does have a sustained dreamlike quality – until, that is, you get used to it. Scenes up to and including K’s appearance in the courthouse are repeatedly confounding. After a while, though, you realise the horror of the story isn’t building and the sequences aren’t so disconnected from each other that they keep you disoriented. Welles’s choice of music, Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, is almost reassuring because it has associations beyond the alarming world described on the screen.
The same goes for some of the performers, especially Welles himself. His extras are, throughout The Trial s two hours, figures that might be encountered in a nightmare; from a crowd of elderly men and women, undressed and physically depleted, that features in an early scene, to the schoolgirls who chase K up the stairs to the studio of the artist Titorelli (William Chappell) and, once Titorelli has shut them out, continue to stare in through gaps between the wooden slats in a partition. Welles is a remarkable sight as the Advocate, who spends much of his time in bed, attended to by his nurse, Leni (Romy Schneider): baby-faced, he suggests a monstrously inflated spoiled child. When he speaks, though, Welles’s familiar theatrical delivery somehow cuts him down to size.
Anthony Perkins improves as the film goes on. He still seems miscast (he’s no kind of Everyman) yet Perkins makes you realise, as K tries in vain to extricate and assert himself, what a good actor he was – though inevitably limited in the parts he could play, thanks to his distinctive appearance and the legacy of his earlier roles. He’s particularly good here when K has less to say: when a scene is dominated by imagery, such as the bodies of K and Leni entwined amid a sea of office files; or when another character dominates the conversation – like the crippled woman (Suzanne Flon) who, despite K’s offers of assistance, insists on dragging heavy luggage across an area of waste ground, censuring him all the way.
Welles’s film is less than the sum of its parts but visually it is a wonder. I may have been wrong to dismiss the first visitors to K’s lodgings as ‘screen heavies’. Edmond Richard’s cinematography evokes the tilted angles and lengthened shadows of German Expressionist cinema, which had already influenced film noir. Perhaps it’s right enough, then, that figures looking to belong in a Hollywood noir make an appearance in The Trial.
18 April 2024
