The Trial

The Trial
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Criterion
1962 / 118 Min. / 1.66.1
Starring Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Orson Welles
Directed by Orson Welles

The funereal music warns us to turn back but the camera moves on, gliding toward the castle and up to a chamber where a solitary figure waits in the shadows—there to greet us is not the undead Dracula but the newly-dead Charles Foster Kane. Those seeing Orson Welles’s 1941 classic for the first time may be surprised to find that its prologue resembles the overture to a horror film—and though Citizen Kane is in many ways a monster movie, its overtly gothic prelude soon gives way to the helter-skelter rhythms that befit a modernist masterpiece.

Gregg Toland’s black velvet photography is part of Kane‘s enduring presence and for most of his life Welles would continue to work mainly in black and white—even in the early sixties the director was drawn to the beautiful monochrome imagery that elevated his greatest work, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Chimes at Midnight. In 1962 he was occupying a room in the hotel Meurice—the “heart of Paris”—to prepare for his next project, also filmed in black and white and also a kind of horror movie. It was a film based on the work of Franz Kafka—Welles himself describes it in his opening narration as a “nightmare.”

The director had just finished designing the sets for the production which was to be filmed in Paris and Croatia when he was informed there was no money to build sets of any kind. But if necessity is the mother of invention then surely poverty is its father. Welles looked out the window of his suite and found himself staring at the Gare d’Orsay, a railway station only a short distance from the hotel. The original structure was burned in 1871 and rebuilt decades later, opening to the public at the turn of the century in 1900.

Now Gare d’Orsay was deserted, and with its multitude of claustrophobic cubicles and rococo hideaways, it would serve as Welles’s defacto studio and major inspiration—he had discovered his latest haunted house. Like the cursed mansions of Roger Corman’s House of Usher (“The house is the monster” explained Corman) or Ettington Park, the estate used in 1963’s The Haunting (“Some houses are born bad.”), the imposing walls of the Gare d’Orsay itself provide a major clue to the riddle of Welles’s The Trial.

On the morning of his 30th birthday Josef K is arrested at his boardinghouse. Yet the arresting officers and a man known as the “inspector” seem confused—they don’t know exactly why they’re arresting this anxious young bank employee—and, even stranger, they leave K’s apartment without detaining him—it seems as if this “arrest” was just the first volley in a series of humiliations and threats issued by a faceless government. The Trial follows K through the literal twists and turns of the Gare d’Orsay—its narrow hallways, like an enormous mousetrap, mirroring K’s increasingly narrow existence. And moviegoers are tested as well; the film is problematic even among Welles’s most fervent fans though the director was unmoved; “you’re supposed to have a very unpleasant time.”

When Welles did venture close to horror, like the opening frames of Kane or the funhouse scene in The Lady from Shanghai, the atmosphere was darkly beautiful, even exciting, like a phantasmagorical bedtime story. But The Trial, though dazzling to look at—it was photographed by Edmond Richard—is a chilly experience, perhaps too successful in capturing Kafka’s paranoid environment. Much of that alienation is the result of what was surely the result of a compromised budget: the movie is almost entirely dubbed—we’re in a world where everyone is disconnected from their own voices, as if their conversations were piped in from some unknown puppet-master. In other words, the effect is quite appropriate.

Thankfully three of Europe’s most captivating leading ladies bring some heat to the table. France’s Jeanne Moreau is Marika Bürstner, Josef’s careworn neighbor, a nightclub entertainer and possible hustler. Italy’s Elsa Martinelli is Hilda, the overly friendly wife of a courtroom guard. And in this trio of wild cards, Germany’s Romy Schneider is the wildest—she is Leni, the bizarrely sexy nursemaid to Albert Hastler, a Machiavellian lawyer known as “The Advocate.” Welles himself plays Hastler (it’s clear who the real puppet-master is in this film).

Anthony Perkins, the man who famously declared “I think that we’re all in our private traps… and none of us can ever get out”, plays Josef. If Norman Bates was a fidgety character on the brink of a breakdown, K is positively wired, consumed with guilt and tortured by a hair-trigger response system. Josef was also despised by his director; Welles equated K with the very bureaucrats who haunt him, a Vichy pawn.

Edmond Richard was also cinematographer on Chimes at Midnight, worked on Welles’s starcrossed Don Quixote project, and photographed three of Luis Buñuel’s seventies classics, including The Phantom of Liberty, another film that questions the meaning of freedom. The great triumph of The Trial is most apparent in Welles’s collaboration with this cameraman, they contrive a series of images that are like evidence for an indictment: the barren apartment complexes that resemble bombed out neighborhoods, a distressing procession of half-naked elders wearing only sheets and name tags, a great hall with workers packed like sardines—perhaps an homage to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment but with far more chilling implications.

At no point in his career did Welles seem capable of making an uninteresting movie and The Trial proves that at every turn—the film is as unpredictable as K’s fate; at one moment the film is as pensive as a still-life, at another the action is so frenzied it resembles the work of a combat photographer in the heat of battle. This astonishing if flawed film could have been the inspiration for any number of apocalyptic horror movies, from 1964’s The Last Man on Earth to Terry Gillian’s Brazil. Welles wrote the screenplay but in some respects he also wrote it a second time through the lens of Richard’s camera.

The new Blu ray set from Criterion uses the recent 4K restoration by Studio Canal and the Cinémathèque Française, and the imagery is immaculate, sleek, and lustrous. The regular Blu ray is accompanied by an Ultra HD disc and Glenn Erickson reports the image “flatters Richard’s brilliant cinematography, which maintains a consistently stark and raw appearance in all of Welles’ complicated lighting setups.”

The extras include a new audio commentary with film historian and Welles scholar Joseph McBride, author of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career. McBride was also apparently in the audience for another of the Criterion extras, 1981’s Filming “The Trial.” The 90 minute program features the director on stage facing an auditorium packed with students as Welles fields questions about The Trial (the documentary was shot by Welles’s longtime cameraman, Gary Graver).

Also included is an episode of Vive le cinéma!, a French television program starring Jeanne Moreau and her dinner guest, Orson Welles. There is also an interview with Edmond Richard called Orson Welles, Architect of Light. Rounding out the digital extras is the movie’s original theatrical trailer. Inside the keepcase is an essay by Jonathan Lethem.

Here’s Joe Dante on The Trial: