Review of: The Trial, A Movie by Orson Welles

By Tim Krenz

August 31, 2007

           In the history of cinema, no filmmaker stands taller for vision, genius, and pure art than Orson Welles. Although he made relatively few feature films, and finished none in the last decades of his life, the world regards his creations on celluloid as a complete order of of skill, talent, and accomplishment that tower, like Welles physically on screen, above any other films ever made. The American Film Institute, and the vast majority of opinion, consider 1941's Citizen Kane (co-written, directed and produced by Welles in his early 20s) as the greatest film of all time. Rightly so. However, in his own opinion, Welles said himself, “Say what you will, but The Trial is the best film I have ever made.”

           Relatively obscure to film lovers (I discovered it ordering Welles' Touch of Evil), The Trial's 1963 print negative was thought lost for 30 years until found, restored, and released as a special edition in 2003. (The film got “lost” in the public domain and inferior quality versions circulate. If this article inspires anyone to view it, the “LaserLight DVD Special Edition” is rated a top quality version. It is available on Amazon or perhaps through the local library loan system).

           Starring a young Anthony Perkins (of Hitchcock's Psycho) The Trial's excellent aural and visual adaptation of the posthumous 1920s novel, by the Czech-German genius, Franz Kafka, shows philosophy on film. The identifiable film making techniques of Welles' match perfectly Kafka's mind as revealed in the entire canon of Kafka's writings. Directing details like two simple camera pans in one shot use the movement of actors to create the “disconnection fiction” style of Kafka for the viewer. The shot goes from a straight and level long shot of the characters at the end of a small, low-ceilinged room, to pan the movement of Perkins within an up-angled close-up to the left. This creates a large, but dwarfishly-dark figure lost in the recesses of his fear. The shot then pans with the character back the start position long shot. This simple, generic yet inspired framed unity of all the elements in sight create the philosophical distant between reality and horror and back again within seconds. In such ways throughout does Welles capture the essence of what literary criticism calls “Kafkaesque.”

           Welles re-orders dimensions throughout, which stress and “stresses” Joseph K.'s reality once he learns in the opening that he faces “charges.” Welles, either a true innovator still within tradition, or the one who established the ideal conventions, places his signature style that only honor Kafka's interpreted intent . The plot un-peels the main character, Joseph K., as the nervy, paranoid, scared, nameless company clerk. He works 6 days a week, 12 hours a day among 600 in a warehouse-sized space. In this world of The Trial, in “Kafkaesque” time and space, Joseph K. lived the vanilla, average, generic man in a cheap, neatly worn gray suit. He fears doing wrong, follows society's rules that demand conformity, plain “oatmeal” armies of anti-personality in order to function.

           In the beginning of the book, Joseph K. awakes to police inspectors entering his boarding room to begin the investigation into his “crime.” Welles, however, begins the production differently, to great effect. He abbreviates a commentary-like fairy tale from within the book, the “Legend of the Doorkeeper.” Done in sketched storyboards of a faceless man seeking to enter the “law” that he thinks should serve everyone, Welles' well-known voice narrates, “Before the law, there stands a guard.” And the guard keeps the law. The seeker waits his whole life to enter the law. He makes generous gift offerings all his possessions to the guard as a bribe. Still, like Joseph K., the guard refuses passage to from the dark world to the one of integrated, mixed spectrum colors. Both the seeker and Joseph K. remain stuck outside, in the black and white exterior of existence, matched by the film's print color and its internal compositions of film noir lights and shadows. What does the law represent? Justice? Equality? Heaven? Happiness? It depends, I suppose.

           Joseph K. pursues to become part of the law, on a plane higher than the presumed-guilty sufferer of it. Instead of benefiting from the existent life, the man outside the door and Joseph K. himself (all humanity?) endure the prison of it. The man in the fable believes he must please the guard and find his favor, a symbol perhaps of dedicated diligence to society's codes and its required “conformitting” to class, race, intelligence, station, ethnicity separation. Instead of letting the man pass with his bribes, Welles' somber, sorrowful, admission narratives the doorkeeper-guard as saying, “I take what you give me only so that you will not feel that you have left something undone.”

           This movie entertains on many levels, like Kafka's writings, and that of his other pre-World War II German-language contemporaries, Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann. Throughout the compositions on the screen, Welles as screenwriter and director, and portraying Joseph K.'s unsympathetic court advocate, Edmund Richard the cinematographer, and the film editor Yvonne Martin, incorporate interior and exterior Gothic location sets and “worker's paradise style” architectures in Europe to place setting, character, plot, and theme into a masterful mix of design. This totality leads and draws Perkin's Joseph K. to prove his innocence to the law, but even more, TO FIND OUT WHAT CHARGES HE EVEN FACES.

           Joseph K.'s quest to live as a part of and at peace with the law has all the elements of a tremendously original, interesting and just film adaptation of one of the most important and orignal works of 20^th Century literature. Yet I encourage readers and eventual viewers ask themselves an important question for our time: Do we all live with the liberty of the Creator's natural laws like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or do we live under the boot heel of those “doorkeepers” guarding and interpreting them?