THE TRIAL *

Orson Welles' film version of Kafka's "The Trial" is a perfectly fine 'visualisation' 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 'able'. 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.