Orson Welles has been dubbed many times with many titles: prodigy, unfathomable genius, creative genius, natural, greatest, &c. I couldn't agree more with all those titles, but I prefer to dub him with my own invention: Awesome Welles. The story of how Orson Welles became Orphan Welles at age 15 and Awesome Welles at age 25 and kept on going up and up the scale of awesomeness is long and, I hate to say, sad. Sad because he was considered too much of a genius (or to use their own term, "rebellious") for his time and had to struggle, despite all his inborn talent, to earn his bread. In fact, he used to act in other filmmaker's films and sell his inimitable voice to narrations and present himself in hack
TV commercials (
another) for only one reason: salary.
While there are many reasons for his lifelong poverty, both external and internal reasons as he himself was at least partly responsible for his poverty being bad as he was with managing money, this post is not about any of that. I am writing this specifically to (try to) express my inexpressible appreciation of one of his films,
The Trial (1962), about which Welles said:
Say what you will, but The Trial is the best film I have ever made. I have never been so happy as when I made that film.
I'm not trying to write a review of the film (if need be of that, I refer you to a well-covered,
4-star-rated Roger Ebert review of
The Trial, four stars being the highest he gives any film). Rather, I'll comment on the general character of the film and why it really is, as Welles said in the afore-quoted statement, the best film he ever made, along with, of course,
Citizen Kane.
A brief history of how this film came to be:
Citizen Kane is the first and the only film, up until the 70s, in which the director had been given absolute control over all aspects of the film. So much control, in fact, that even the producers and the studio people weren't allowed to see
rushes or any part of the film until the final cut of the film came out, and when it did, even if they hated it, they couldn't do anything to it. Welles often said that that was the reason why
Citizen Kane came out as good as it did, and since he was never given that kind of control again, he had put up a challenge: "Give me that kind of control again, and I'll give you a film better than
Citizen Kane." The only other time he came close to it was with
The Trial, where European producer Alexander Salkind offered him near-complete control except for small sections of score, which eventually did come out great anyway and Welles did not complain. Unfortunately, however, once the film was completed, it was not marketed the way
Citizen Kane was and thus did not receive the same kind of attention and as a result has largely remained unseen by critics and public. Typical. The film eventually ended up in the public domain, which means no one can claim copyright to it and anyone can distribute it anywhere -- which has both pros and cons.
Anyhow...
The Trial is an adaptation of Kafka's surreal novella of the same name, and as someone accurately described it: "The film is a competition between Kafka and Welles, with Kafka coming second place." This is one of those rare gems of adaptation where the film outperforms the book.
The film makes you feel uncomfortable and disorientates you at every possible opportunity, and there's absolutely nothing the audience can feel safe about. It punishes you for watching it. It disorientates, makes you dizzy, psychologically upsets you, confuses even. It's cruel to the audience. But in that cruelty lies a strange sense of amazement and attraction that showcases the directorial potential of Orson Welles as truly deserving the title of the Greatest Director Ever, an undisputed master of mood. Welles himself appears in the small role of The Advocate -- a mean, harsh, overpowering character that he plays with such conviction that I can't help but place him into the same rank as Marlon Brando, which previous to watching
The Trial I hadn't felt so strongly.
At the end of the opening pin-animated sequence Welles says, "Some have said this story has the logic of a dream...of a NIGHTMARE." It's impossible to say exactly what, after watching the film, made the entire thing feel so nightmarish. It was the totality and combination of everything in the film, of course, but it's impossible to consciously assess how all those factors come together into making it feel creepy and disturbing. There is nothing overtly creepy or disturbing about it, but Welles works so much on the subtlety of its nightmarish feel that only the emotions are transferred, not the inner workings of it. Given that Welles was an accomplished magician in real life, it only makes more sense that he would do something this brilliant without letting the audience in on how he is doing it. And Kafka cannot be given credit for its nightmare-like character, at least not entirely, because there have been numerous other adaptations of
The Trial and none of them come even one-tenth close to the utter magnificence of Welles' impossible-to-emulate adaptation.
As for the plot line of the film: A man named Joseph K. is brought in for a courtroom trial without being made aware of the charges, and he and the audience struggle, in this surreal world he is surfing through, to find out what his charges are while at the same time he attends the trial and defends himself like he knows precisely what he is accused of: of being himself (Ebert's review has good exposition on this). And as is characteristic of surreal stories, interpretation is open to every member of the audience.
In a 1981 documentary/interview called
Making The Trial, Welles in answer to a question said, "My vision of
The Trial is not the same as Kafka's vision, and no director should ever find the need to stay true to the novel, because once adapted, it becomes your perspective, and hence, your story." I wholeheartedly agree. To me,
The Trial is as much of a crowning glory in Orson Welles' oeuvre as
Citizen Kane.
_____
And oh, before I forget, Anthony Perkins, who played the antagonist in
Psycho, has put forth one of the best performances screen has ever seen, and his unsettling presentation of body language and dialogues is one of the things, I reckon, that makes this film like living through a nightmare. Perkins in
Making The Trial stated that the high point of his life was having acted in an Orson Welles film, having been directed by Orson Welles.
