The Trial (1962)

I think the chief accomplishment of Orson Welles’ The Trial is that it so fully traps us in its dream world. The movie is an adaptation of Kafka’s novel about a man named Josef K who wakes up one morning to find that he is being persecuted for some unknown offense. K stumbles from one bizarre confrontation with the law to another. He is never told what he's charged with, but he is assured that his case is going very badly. Welles’ film takes this surreal premise and runs with it.

The primary pleasure of an Orson Welles movie is the visual texture the director creates. The Trial is, in some ways, the best example of this in his entire body of work. Nearly every shot in this movie is rich, layered, and interesting on its own merits. As a director, Welles was often accused of stylistic excess (a charge I would largely dispute), but because The Trial unfolds with “the logic of a dream,” Welles' stylistic depth is wholly appropriate. He creates a world that closes in on Josef K (Anthony Perkins) one scene at a time. Welles, who was never a realist, here makes his most expressionistic film. It was one of the few times in his post-Citizen Kane career where he had the freedom to achieve his vision how he saw fit.

And what a vision it is: shot largely in the Gare d’Orsay in Paris, the architecture is constantly pressing in on Anthony Perkins, yet the film is full of huge spaces. Welles makes an epic out of these caverns. The camera is forever angled so as to make the ceilings press down. Angles are sharpened like knives and the film is full of lines and maddening, slanting, symmetrical perfection. When K goes to work, it is at an office straight out of Vidor’s The Crowd, with desks and florescent lights, perfectly aligned, stretching off into infinity. Even in scenes shot outside, Welles uses plain building facades with long lines of bare windows. K is like a man caught inside a machine about to crush him to pieces.

Anthony Perkins is a perfect choice to play K because he has that essential weirdness that seems totally at place in this type of story, which is to say that he seems completely incapable of figuring out what the hell is going on. He’s jittery and oddly funny, a maladroit constantly being thwarted in his desire to sort things out logically.

His performance would be out of place in most movies, but The Trial, wonderfully, isn’t most movies. The entire affair is lifted beyond what we’re used to seeing onscreen and Welles’ ambition is to give us a dreamlike world, a nightmare we can’t see through. He succeeds in this respect because the movie doesn’t seem placed in our world. It almost seems to have been shot on a gigantic studio set, every frame seeming wonderfully artificial. I say almost, however, because it doesn’t have a studio look like Willy Wonka’s factory or the Emerald City in Oz, though it is every bit as offbeat. It seems real but not real. Sort of like a dream. That it was shot without many sets at all and still achieves its otherworldly quality is a testament to Jean Ledrut's creepy score and Welles’ ability to scout and shoot on location (see more about that here). It’s also a testament to the innate weirdness of certain sections of Paris and Zagreb.

The Trial, forgotten by many people, is one of Welles’ great achievements. It should not be missed.