The Trial (1962 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Orson Welles watched the rough cut of The Trial exactly once, in a darkened editing suite in Paris, and then declared it the best film he had ever made. That claim was either the most audacious self-assessment in cinema history or the most perceptive. The year was 1962, and Welles had arrived at this project sideways, plucked from a list of 82 literary titles assembled by a producer who originally wanted to make something else entirely. What emerged from that accident of circumstance was a vision of bureaucratic dread so complete, so strange, and so visually restless that critics and scholars have never agreed on what to do with it. Was it a masterpiece? A misfire? A black comedy about a man accused of nothing, destroyed by everyone? The questions planted by The Trial do not resolve themselves neatly. They accumulate, like the corridors of a court that has no visible entrance and no discernible exit.

• 2. A Kafka From a List

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  Alexander Salkind first approached Welles in 1960 with a plan to adapt Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba. When Salkind discovered that producer Harold Hecht was already filming that novella with Yul Brynner in the lead, he pivoted, handing Welles a catalogue of 82 alternative public-domain titles. Welles chose The Trial as the most feasible project from the list. He had been nudged toward it earlier that year by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who may have been Welles's son, and who had floated the idea of staging the Kafka novel as a play. That conversation prompted Welles to note that The Trial was an important book and that he himself should re-read it.

  The project carried one complication from the start: the 1925 posthumously published novel turned out not to be in the public domain after all. Salkind and Welles had to acquire the rights before a frame was shot. Salkind then secured 650 million French francs, equivalent to US $1.3 million in 1962 currency, through a coalition of West German, French, and Italian investors. In exchange, he promised Welles total artistic freedom and pledged not to interfere with the creative work.

  Welles spent six months writing the screenplay, and his adaptation was anything but timid. He rearranged the order of Kafka's chapters so that the chapter line-up read 1, 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 8, 7, 9, 10. He noted that the original chapter order had been set by Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, after the writer's death, and that this sequence was not definitive. He modernized several story elements, including the introduction of computer technology and a change to Miss Bürstner's occupation from typist to cabaret performer.

• 3. Building the Labyrinth

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  Welles began shooting in Yugoslavia, and the production's logistical ambitions were immediately apparent. In an exposition hall just outside Zagreb, he constructed the centerpiece of Josef K.'s working world: 850 secretaries seated at 850 office desks, each one banging a typewriter. The image required both the floor space of an industrial building and a willingness to stage bureaucracy on the scale of spectacle. Other sequences followed in Dubrovnik, Rome, Milan, and Paris. Welles had hoped to film in Prague, the city where Kafka had lived and worked, but the communist government of Czechoslovakia barred the project, regarding Welles's artistic approach as decadent.

  The interiors in Paris presented a separate crisis. Welles had planned to use the Boulogne Studios for that work, but Salkind ran into delays collecting the promised capital. The solution Welles found was the Gare d'Orsay, an abandoned Parisian railway station whose scale he had not originally intended. In an interview with Cahiers du cinéma, he explained: "Everything was improvised at the last moment, because the whole physical concept of my film was quite different. It was based on the absence of sets. And the gigantic nature of the sets, which people have objected to, is partly due to the fact that the only setting I had was that old abandoned station." The cathedral-like proportions of Gare d'Orsay gave the film its most immediately recognizable quality: a world that dwarfs its inhabitants not through malice but through sheer architectural indifference.

  While filming in Zagreb, Welles met a 21-year-old Croatian actress named Olga Palinkaš. He renamed her Oja Kodar, and she became his companion and occasional artistic collaborator during the later years of his life.

• 4. The Choices Behind the Camera

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  Before the first scene of the film, Welles added a prologue he had not originally planned. He narrated Kafka's parable "Before the Law" over pinscreen animation created by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. The technique involves thousands of pins pushed to varying depths in a board to create animated images that resemble chiaroscuro drawings in motion. Welles opened with this fable about a man permanently turned away from the entrance to the Law, setting the allegory in place before Josef K. had even appeared on screen.

  Welles initially hoped to cast Jackie Gleason, the American comic actor, as the Advocate. When Gleason rejected the part, Welles took it himself, playing the character under the name Albert Hastler. He also dubbed the dialogue for eleven actors in the film. He reportedly recorded a few lines in place of Anthony Perkins and then challenged Perkins to identify the substitutions. Perkins could not find them. British actor Peter Sallis was brought in separately to dub Max Haufler, whose dialogue had been delivered in Hungarian, into American-accented English.

  Welles changed the manner of Josef K.'s death significantly from Kafka's original. In the novel, the executioners pass a knife over Josef K.'s head, offering him the chance to take it and die in what the text frames as a more dignified manner; Josef K. does not act, and instead is fatally stabbed in the heart, dying with the words "like a dog." In the film, the executioners still offer the knife, but Josef K. refuses it and instead goads them by yelling "You'll have to do it!" The executioners then toss dynamite into the quarry pit where Josef K. is held. The film closes with the smoke of the blast forming a mushroom cloud while Welles reads the closing credits aloud on the soundtrack.

• 5. Perkins and the Subtext

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  Anthony Perkins plays Josef K. as a man who is perpetually on the back foot, but Welles built a secondary layer into his performance that audiences in 1962 were unlikely to name openly. Henry Jaglom, a friend of Welles, later recounted that Welles had told him he knew Perkins was gay and that he used that quality deliberately. In Jaglom's account, Welles said the aim was to suggest "another texture in Joseph K, a fear of exposure." He cast three of the most magnetic European actresses of the era in the roles of women who surround Josef: Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli. The film required Josef to remain dispassionate and awkward toward all three. Leni, played by Schneider, repeatedly makes physical advances toward Josef without his invitation; Josef shows little response.

  Jaglom recalled Welles saying that Perkins knew exactly what was being asked of him, though the two men never discussed it directly. Perkins himself, in a later interview with Peter Bogdanovich, described the film as a black comedy, repeating the direction Welles had given him on set. Perkins also said that his greatest professional pride came from being the lead in a Welles-directed feature.

  Film critic Roger Ebert, in his review, proposed that Josef K.'s indifference to the women around him could be read as a nightmare in which women make demands that Josef K. is uninterested in meeting. Welles's casting choice and the structural distance he built between Josef and every female character in the film have led subsequent critics to read The Trial as carrying gay undertones, a subtext that would have been far more radical in 1962 than a straightforward political allegory.

• 6. A Volatile Reception

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  Welles had planned to premiere The Trial at the Venice Film Festival in September 1962, but the film was not finished in time. The festival screened West Side Story, the Academy Award-winning musical, in its place. Welles continued editing through the autumn and into December 1962, when the film finally opened in Paris.

  On the eve of the Paris premiere, Welles cut a sequence of roughly ten minutes, though he later described it as being about six minutes in length. In an interview with the BBC, he explained that the scene showed Josef K. meeting a computer scientist played by Greek actress Katina Paxinou, whose technology was used to predict Josef's fate. Welles said the scene should have been the best in the film but that something went wrong that he could not identify, and that the premiere arrived before he could resolve it. The US theatrical release followed in 1963.

  Critical reaction split sharply. The French Syndicate of Cinema Critics awarded The Trial its Best Film prize in 1963, making France an early champion of the work. Elsewhere the response was harsher. Charles Higham's 1970 biography of Welles dismissed the film as "an agonizing experience … a dead thing, like some tablet found among the dust of forgotten men, speaking a language that has much to say to us, but whose words have largely been rubbed away." David Thomson, writing in his 1996 Welles biography, called it "an astonishing work, and a revelation of the man... a stunning film." On Rotten Tomatoes, 84 percent of 44 critical reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.7 out of 10. Roger Ebert awarded it four stars and described it as "an exuberant use of camera placement and movement and inventive lighting." Argentine film critic Fernando Martín Peña listed it among his ten favorite films in the British Film Institute's 2002 Sight and Sound poll.

• 7. Afterlife and Restoration

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  In 1981, Welles planned to create a documentary about the making of The Trial. Cinematographer Gary Graver was hired to film Welles addressing an audience at the University of Southern California on the film's history. The footage was captured on 16mm color reversal stock, but Welles never completed the project. That footage passed into the hands of Germany's Filmmuseum Munich, where it has since been restored.

  No copyright was ever registered for The Trial, which placed the film in the public domain in the United States. The status is not entirely settled: the Uruguay Round Agreements Act may have restored the copyright, but no Notice of Intent to Enforce was ever filed with the US Copyright Office, leaving the film in a legally ambiguous position.

  The physical materials behind the film survived in better condition than its legal standing. In 2000, Milestone Films released a restored DVD version based on the long-lost original 35mm negative. By 2015, a 2K restoration by Rialto Pictures was circulating in DCP format across various North American cities. On the 19th of September 2023, the Criterion Collection released a 4K restoration of the film, bringing the work that Welles once called the best film he had ever made to its sharpest and most complete presentation yet.