The Trial (1963)

Wow, this is a REALLY bad movie!

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

An unassuming office worker (Anthony Perkins) is arrested and stands trial, but he is never made aware of his charges.Orson Welles is generally considered one of the greats of the film world. And his commanding voice is hard to argue with! Combine with that one of the greatest books in classic literature, Kafka's "Trial", and you have a match made in heaven. We also get Anthony Perkins in possibly his finest performance, though he will always be known as Norman Bates.Someone wrote that what makes this adaptation great is that Welles treated the material as if he wrote it himself. He internalized it and then brought it back out in film form. If that is true, I do not know, but it makes sense... because this is a novel which is not easily turned to linear storytelling.

"The Trial" is a 1962 abstract film from an abstract script based on an abstract novel. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is the Czech-German author of the book, and Orson Welles accounts for the rest of the abstractions and then some. Welles wrote the screen version for "The Trial," directed the movie, and then starred as a supporting actor. Welles is true to Kafka's existentialist weirdness in this adaptation for the movie. But I find it as difficult to take – or enjoy, as I did any of Kafka's works we read in school. Welles's set design and cinematography fit aptly the surreal story situation and lend further to its unevenness. One thing that puzzles me is why Welles changed the very end. With his penchant for daring, unusual, mysterious and even shock situations, Welles changed the book's ending. Instead of a crescendo to the film, which the book's ending would have been, the changed one in the film is almost silly. The acting is quite good all around, with Anthony Perkins especially good as Josef K. Other technical aspects of the film are very good. The choice of filming in black and white rather than color will become obvious to viewers who may not otherwise be familiar with Kafka's writing or Welles's work. It's interesting that Kafka wrote "The Trial" during 1914-15, but it wasn't published until after his death, in 1925. I'm not a literary expert or critic, and can't understand the adulation among some for Kafka's work. It's weird, bland and cold, hard to makes sense of in places, and surely not enjoyable. This film has a relatively high IMDb viewer rating and a sizable number of users who have rated it. From other reviews, I can only guess that many are people who enjoy so-called "art" films of today. But, unless you are among that group, you're not very likely to find this movie very entertaining.

"Nowadays you can hardly say anything against Orson Welles without invoking scorn and ridicule," Kristl mused."You were going to?""Not on purpose, but I feel a bit apprehensive about it. I mean you have a certain amount of leeway towards almost any other director, except for Welles.. You have to say he was a great guy..""Pff.." Henry said."Yeah.""You do not have to, with me," Henry said."Thanks.""So, I think it is an old boring slow moving that is a bit confusing, to say the least," Henry said."You think so?""I mean, black and white in 1962," Henry said."Uh, well..is that such a big thing?""Yeah.. and no action.""Okay..I feel compelled to come to the defense of this movie."Henry smiled, but he hid his smile behind his hand and pretended to take sip from his tea, "Hot," he remarked."Regardless of anything it's at least a decent film, although it seems to be all over the place," Kristl said."It looks like someone pasted a lot of 'scenes' together without much sense and pawned it off as a coherent movie," Henry said."Really?""Yeah.""It seems to be quite true to the book.. which means that any coherence in the movie, or any incoherence for that matter, must stem from the book," Kristl said."Then the books must be a bit of a confusing mess," Henry said. "Maybe, but I liked the movie, you know. It was surreal, strange and unsettling. Which seems appropriate to me..""Right.""For the Kafka story that is.""Oh, did you read it by the way?""No," Kristl shook her head."Me neither.""I think that goes for most of the audience," Kristl said."Yeah. So how you know it is fitting?""Well, other people say so that it is. Except for the ending. Which was thought off by Orson Welles. He felt it to be more appropriate. It seem to have to do with the holocaust. I am not quite sure. Seems more that the end is fitting to a cold war.""Yeah. But anyway, too old a movie for me really," Henry said."I think it's a good movie, but not astounding. Perkins is such a dubious choice. At times he is really excellent, but at other times he seems to be a poor choice. He has these wild mood swings. He constantly hovers between assertive and dejected. It's just odd how he swings from one attitude to the opposite.""Heh.""And there seems to be no development in his character. He just seems to go from one mood to the other depending on what is fitting for the scene at the moment. So there seems to be no humanit that drives him, just like: in this scene he should be angry and in this scene he should be desperate.""Ah.""It is just a bit to fabricated. A very nice fabrication, but a fabrication nevertheless.""Like most movies.""Yup. Did you know someone made a sequel to the trial?""Yes I did. Will Eisner made one called the Appeal. In it justice is done.""Oh you know..""Hey it's a comic. It was Eisner responding to Kafka. While Kafka painted a surreal world in which a man was the victim of soulless bureaucracy, Eisner seems to say that in a democratic society 'they' would not get away with it in the end.""Maybe someone should make a movie about that?" Henry said."Maybe someone will."www.meritcoba.com

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.