Orson Welles Claimed This Was His Best Picture

In a video commentary at the invaluable website “Trailers From Hell,” the director Joe Dante cites a quotation from Orson Welles claiming that “The Trial” (1962) was “the best picture I ever made.” Some 20 years after Welles’s debut — you remember, his “Citizen Kane,” that movie with Rosebud and all — the fecund director had likely grown weary of a film that became as much of an albatross as a monument. Long after his days as Hollywood’s wunderkind had passed, the ever mercurial Welles may have been putting one on in touting his jerry-rigged take on Kafka as his pièce de résistance.Or maybe not. It’s worth recalling that many of Welles’s projects — most notably, “The Magnificent Ambersons” — were adulterated by studio interference. That they have come to us as vital testaments to the art of cinema says much about Welles’s galvanic talent. But what can it mean that “The Trial” — one of the director’s few movies to be released as he wanted it — was a box office flop and, for some years, considered a fool’s venture?Certainly, there are authors whose work is more accessible to a popular audience and, for that matter, more conducive to cinematic translation. How does one embody a cosmos as inherently literary as Kafka’s? Welles took a cue from Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, who configured “The Trial” from an array of chapters that had no discernible order and may not have been completed. Welles spent a good part of a year on the screenplay, tweaking, twisting and updating the book. What Brod did to Kafka, in other words, Welles did to Brod. The result is a picture of lumbering proportions and angular byways, a shaggy dog story that gains muscle from its arrant embrace of artifice.“The Trial,” which is having an extended run at Film Forum beginning December 9, opens with Welles narrating a fable that he dutifully informs us appears in the novel. The accompanying visuals, animations of a sort, were done through a labor-intensive process involving the manipulation of movable pins placed within a screen. The resulting story-book images are coarse and otherworldly — imagine Alfred Kubin by way of Seurat. They offer a quietly hyperbolic correlative to Welles’s claim that “the logic of this story is the logic of a dream, of a nightmare.”Whereupon the scene shifts to an up-ended close-up of our — well, neither “hero” or “anti-hero” is quite right to describe Josef K., here played by Anthony Perkins. If anything, Josef is an un-hero, a cipher operating within a social structure that values him only to the extent to which he can aid in perpetuating its machinations. When a pair of thuggish officiaries saunter into Josef’s bedroom to accuse him of an unnamed crime, the resulting interrogation comes on like a Marx Brothers routine, albeit one whose rhythms and wordplay have been denuded of emphasis and joy.We are reminded that there is, in fact, a dour strain of comedy filtering through Kafka’s weltanschauung, and Welles’s casting of Perkins emphasizes the point. At this late date, we can’t help but see any Perkins performance through the lens of “Psycho.” One does have to wonder if Welles hired him after seeing his turn, then recent, as Norman Bates. Welles plays up Perkins’s gangly physiognomy and stilted affect by situating him in settings that are either claustrophobic or ungovernable. The actor’s way with dialogue — always precise, often mannered — invariably hints at anxieties that bely Perkins’s everyman carriage. “The Trial” is inconceivable without him.Perkins considered working with Welles the highlight of his career. As for “The Trial” being the highlight of Welles’s career, let’s just say that few filmmakers could’ve pulled off this jagged array of set pieces quite as brilliantly. For every moment of clunky exposition, there are a number of stunning visuals wherein the good director channels “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” by way of Piranesi, Fritz Lang, and Buster Keaton. Aficionados rue the ending and, true enough, it seems less Kafkaesque than merely expedient. Yet “The Trial” is some kind of accomplishment, for sure, a feat of cinematic chutzpah that bears more than one viewing.

Orson Welles Claimed This Was His Best Picture

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