The conversation

The response to the film in its own time was surprisingly — to me, at least — mixed to negative. François Truffaut, who was a longtime film critic before debuting as a director just three years before the release of this film, found much to criticize. (Maybe thinking he would have done it better? He would not.)

The two reasons that I’d give for my disappointment — after noting, however, that the French critical response was generally excellent — are that Welles, who is so much at ease filming power, pride and dominion, maybe isn’t equipped to show their opposites: weakness, humility, submission. Since his adolescence, his corpulence and size have naturally led him to play kings. One almost never sees Orson Welles eat or drive a car (except in The Lady from Shanghai). One often sees him stand up but never sees him sit down. . . .

Orson Welles is bigger than life, Kafka is smaller than life. This is why, filmed from the same angle as Gregory Arkadin or Charles Foster Kane, with the camera at floor level, Kafka’s hero, played by Anthony Perkins, remains distant and scarcely touches us. As Jean Cocteau put it: “The poet is a bird who must sing in his genealogical tree.” I have seen The Trial several times, and after impatiently awaiting each of Akim Tamiroff’s scenes, I have come to the conclusion that the film would have been Kafkaesque and moving if the cast had all been made up of Central European Jewish actors.

Whatever Franz Kafka was laboriously attempting to say about the tyranny of modern social systems in his novel, “The Trial” is still thoroughly fuzzy and hard to fathom in the film Orson Welles has finally made from the 40-year-old novel. Evidently it is something quite horrific about the brutal, relentless way in which the law as a social institution reaches out and enmeshes men in its complex and calculating clutches until it crushes them to death. At least, that is what this viewer gathers from the crazy and symbolistic stuff that Mr. Welles and an excellent cast of actors have regurgitated on the screen.

What a movie version of “The Trial” requires isn’t exotic settings, weird camera angles, and voices echoing hollowly down improbable passageways but a bleak, bland ordinariness of film and sound, in which every setting, every action is precisely what it appears to be. Outrageous reasonableness is the iron rule and may not be violated. Have I sufficiently indicated that I think Orson Welles is the last man on earth who ought to have made a movie of “The Trial”?

Perhaps feelings have changed with hindsight. Here’s an essay by Jonathan Lethem via Criterion that absolutely mirrors my thinking.

Welles’s interrogation of Kafka’s subtext wouldn’t mean much if the director hadn’t found a cinematic language equal to the novelist’s distinctive effects: those careening yet gnomic set pieces; the tonal vertigo that seems to excavate the underside of ordinary existence; and, above all, the serene, dreamlike juxtapositions and jumps, so incontrovertibly lucid, that give Kafka’s writing its crazy power. Who better than Welles, really, to depict the discontinuous spatiality that caused Jorge Luis Borges to compare Kafka to the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea? Preparing to shoot, Welles drew up designs for elaborate sets he wasn’t allowed to create—some of the sketches survive, possessing an expressionistic power perhaps most closely approximated in the final film by the slatted cage that houses the sinister court painter Titorelli (William Chappell).

Yet Welles’s employment of found locations, including the vacated Gare d’Orsay train station in Paris, worked better than any sets could have done. The movie shatters multiple European cities into fragments, crushing together antiquity and modernity, and claustrophobia and barren enormity, to form a labyrinth that grips K. as tightly as the teeth of a vise.