Film Reviews: 'The Trial'
Rare is the critic who can manage to look at a film like [The Trial] except through a kind of screen set up by the original work. No amount of consciousness about problems of adaptation, and all that, can gainsay this tendency—only ignorance is a real safeguard. Luckily, however, I have not read Kafka's novel for many years. Consequently, looking at Welles' Trial, I find it an interesting film, rather than a disappointing derivative. It is, of course, in many ways not only unKafka-like but positively anti-Kafka. (p. 40)
The film is an attempt to create a nightmare world, rather like that of 1984. It is vaguely European in decor, with a melange of nineteenth-century monumentalism, now decayed, and some twentieth-century counterparts which at first seem to give the film an unfortunate dislocation; gradually one realizes that this is the landscape of a totalitarian nightmare. Though a few elements are discordant because of an unduly specific modernity …, it mixes the antique and modern in everything. Some of the settings might have been chosen with an eye to those ghastly Piranesi drawings of dungeons: but the ancient, crumbling buildings are inhabited by men who have erected, or perhaps only seized from prior uses, temporary partitions, makeshifts. It is, we soon learn, a world of sudden violence, avid sexuality, and inexplicable happenings generally. (pp. 40-1)
There is of course no love in this universe…. It is a world of bursts of ferocity, of murderous hates, mysterious beatings: a world of mutually brutalized slaves…. [It] systematically makes it hard to distinguish reality from fantasy. There is terrible power afoot, but vague and ill-limited. Side by side with the obscure politics and its sudden brutality exists a sullen and avid sexuality. (pp. 41-2)
The Trial abounds in comic scenes, and would be obviously quite a cut-up movie if audiences did not come prepared for High Culture—prepared, that is, for polite despair. What they find is K and Lena distractedly cuddling on an ocean of bureaucratic records, the grotesque "Uncle Max," Bloch's derrière sticking up absurdly as he kisses Hassler's hand, etc. It is not a downbeat film, of course, but nobody can believe this because of the book….
The Trial also abounds with virtuoso visuals, most of them stunningly successful; this is a movie in unabashed high style, with none of your realistic widescreen coolness….
Welles, as usual, plays a demonic man of power (he appears first wreathed in steam, like something from the underworld) and his magnificent voice manages to give an electric tension between its sonorous, sensible sound and the outrageousness of what it says. Once Welles is on the screen, the powers of darkness become compelling and one has a vision of the film that might have been—
Even the present one, however, is surely a remarkable work. (p. 42)
Ernest Callenbach, "Film Reviews: 'The Trial'," in Film Quarterly (copyright 1963 by The Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of the University of California Press), Vol. XVI, No. 4, Summer, 1963, pp. 40-3.
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