‘The Trial’ of Orson Welles

When one of his many potential projects fell apart in the early sixties, Orson Welles chose pretty much at random to film The Trial, Kafka’s nightmarishly comic vision of guilt and absurdity. A superb Criterion Collection edition from last fall gives this dark gem of a film some long deserved attention. It’s the story of Joseph K, an ordinary man who is suddenly informed one day that he is guilty of a crime that he wasn’t even aware that he committed and who wanders through an increasingly demented bureaucracy trying to get information about his case, which will not be disclosed.

It’s almost a cliché at this point to say that Kafka was prophetic about what the latter half of the 20th Century would be like after he died in 1925. His turbulent imagination outlined the mass horror to come. Mechanized despotism, unaccountable systems, ambient paranoia. That’s what Kafkaesque means. At the time Welles had an axe to grind over the philistines in Hollywood who kept turning his ideas down, not to mention the nascent threat of the blacklist, which he partly went to Europe to avoid.

The Trial is the best example of poor Kafka’s unintentional political foresight—you could easily apply the nightmarish logic of its premise  to any number of very real situations around the globe, both when Kafka wrote it in the early 20^th Century and now, many years later. These days we’re pretty widely aware that entities are watching, monitoring, and surveilling us in some way. We know that the websites we go to and the transactions we make appear on some database somewhere and it’s always possible that one stray remark might expose us to the court of public opinion.

Sadly, Welles had to constantly hustle to get the money to make movies for most of his career and, since he made it on the cheap and on the fly, The Trial tended to wallow in the shadow of his more canonical classics. The cleaned-up print available in Criterion’s Blu-Ray edition makes all those sharp, beautifully ominous shots of winding labyrinths, crumbling churches, and looming ceilings work their dark magic. You can catch every glint of fear and foreboding in Anthony Perkins’s face as his befuddled Joseph K wanders through these elegant, sinister locations trying in vain to find out exactly what he’s done to deserve his plight.

There’s a great curtain raiser which borrows Kafka’s “Before the Law” which is part parable and part Zen koan. Welles introduces us to the mind-bending logic of Kafka’s universe right at the start, with a unique and evocative depiction of its story of the man who waits for admission to the place to which there is apparently no admittance and yet is his and his alone. Welles could read an order for Chinese takeout and it would be dramatic. Give him something from one of the great writers and pair it with a lilting classical tune and you’re on the edge of your seat.

Strange that Perkins, a teen idol who was apparently a tormentedly repressed gay man in real life, played Norman Bates in Psycho and Joseph K. Hitchcock and Welles are the kinds of directors who know everything about their projects and liked working with Perkins a great deal, and it’d be interesting to know if they cast him as characters who are alien to themselves on purpose. Yet even if we don’t know anything about him, Perkins fits the part of Joseph K perfectly: he’s so normal looking that it’s actually kind of suspicious.

You an explain the premise easily enough, but the episodic scenes resist easy explanation or interpretation. It’s all in the sudden changes of tone and pacing. The Trial is not the kind of film that offers up a neat explanation to the audience. You don’t quite understand a surrealist movie like this; you feel it.

Characters appear in and out of the story and have their own agendas, which mostly remain inscrutable they nevertheless act them out on poor Mr. K, who always finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Women throw themselves at him, but shows no interest, which might reinforce the relevance of Perkins’ real life erotic complications. Making sexual repression seem almost erotic is another one of the film’s strange twists.

Everyone seems to know something that K doesn’t about his predicament. It’s one thing if you just throw a bunch of random images and sounds together just to weird out the viewer—Bunuel and Dali, I’m looking in your direction. It’s way more powerful when you have Orson Welles himself, who instantly commands the center of every stage he’s on, lying in an ornate bed looking straight at the viewer and intoning about the fate of certain “marked men” like he’s the voice of God.

Apparently, Welles and the crew had a ball making the film, laughing their heads off at all the ridiculousness. Kafka used to break down in laughter when he started reading his work out loud, too. Other readers have pointed out how funny he is, albeit in dark way. You have to love the moment when a couple making out in the corner interrupts a court case, and when one of the massive law books reveals a dirty picture wedged in the middle. At times it’s not like Joseph K is even on trial at all, it’s more that the sinister machinations of the world around him are just doing what they do, which makes the whole thing seem like one big incomprehensible farce.

Welles was pretty faithful to the source material, which isn’t necessarily saying much when Kafka’s best friend Max Brod, who refused his friend’s dying wish to burn the manuscript, jumbled together and edited the remaining pages. It’s amazing that any of Kafka’s writing survived at all, given how the Nazis killed or exiled nearly everyone around him.

I like that Welles decided not to use Kafka’s original ending and instead gave unlucky Joseph K a better death than his creator did. Welles was a world apart from Kafka in many ways, especially in personality, and yet somehow his version of The Trial gives it a dignity and power that no other movie adaptation has been able to pull off. Maybe the consummate showman had a secret trick up his sleeve, knowing how to turn Kafka’s resonant nightmare into a cinematic waking dream.