The Trial Blu-ray Review

6th Sep 2012

In the 1940s Orson Welles was the enfant terrible of Hollywood. He began many projects that remained incomplete and was known by many as a temperamental filmmaker and would spend an age setting up shots. When viewing such classics as Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Lady From Shanghai (1947) it is clear what a wunderkind Welles was – he was only 26-years-old when he made Kane, his first film. Following a couple of Shakespeare adaptations Welles pretty much self-exiled himself to Europe where he found far greater freedom of expression without being under the Hollywood vice. He used acting in films, both in Europe and in Hollywood to finance his own productions and this adaptation of Frank Kafka’s novel of paranoia and the state system is a fine example of that.

The story is a familiar one to any student of literature or cultural studies student, that of a clerk called Josef K (Anthony Perkins) in a nameless country who is visited as he is waking to get ready to go to work by the authorities for a crime he and we are unsure of and are never made aware of what he has supposedly committed. He finds himself caught up in the grinding wheels of the legal system and attempts to go forward in defending himself, believing that this is simply a case of mistaken identity and finds that he is caught up in a nightmarish situation where people are pointing accusatory fingers at him.

It is great that Studiocanal have decided to re-release this film as previous editions have been wholly a mixed bag of nuts. Previous DVDs have been very grainy or muddily printed or as with the Optimum release which failed to include the opening animated prologue fable narrated by Welles himself about the man who for years is refused entry through a pair of doors only to be told one day that the doors were built for him; although I had seen this film before on TV this fable was also not included but I did finally get to see it on the restored print at the Munich Filmmuseum 4 or 5 years ago. Other versions included the opening animated fable, but in poor quality. This opening scene does provide a strange other worldliness to the film that is repeated throughout adding further grist to its strangeness.

The film is indeed haunting and atmospheric and Welles, as he had done with his Shakespeare adaptations remained faithful to Kafka’s novel although he has mixed some of the chapters around for cinematic effect and cut down the end part of the book, yet never the less does he does an effective job in bringing a complex novel to the screen; although the novel was written in 1926 it remained and became even more pertinent as the century progressed and made at the height of the Cold War – all the more surprising then that Welles managed to get some of it shot in Yugoslavia (the scenes of the nameless looking blocks of flats were apparently shot in Zagreb in present day Croatia). Perkins twitchy and nervy acting style fits perfectly here as Josef K and his performance alone brings much to the film as he had done previously with his role of Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) and he leads a superb cast of European names from Jeanne Moreau and Elsa Martinelli, through to Romy Schneider, Suzanne Flon, a young Michel Lonsdale and includes Welles himself and a regular actor of his, Akin Tamiroff. The whole film is very European in flavour, including the expressionistic, detailed and atmospheric cinematography by Edmond Richard with Welles carefully controlling each shot and a haunting use of the baroque score.

Welles considered this the best film he ever made. It was shot all over Europe and was French made and backed (released in France as Le Procès) with English dialogue. Some scenes are clearly shot in the then abandoned Gare d’Orsay before it was given over and refurbished as the Musée d’Orsay. The extras on the disc are largely French documentaries about the production and the making of the film and are welcome addition to the DVD, a contemporary French TV interview with Welles for a TV programme called ‘Tempo’, a booklet accompanying the DVD and an interview with lovey Steven Berkoff about the adaptations of ‘The Trial’ to stage and screen. All in all this is a superbly packaged DVD, beautifully transferred to Blu-ray (look carefully and you can see Schneider should have waxed her upper lip) which brings out the stunning cinematography.