The Trial (French: Le Procès) is a 1962 drama film written and directed by Orson Welles, based on the 1925 posthumously published novel of the same name by Franz Kafka.
[2] The film begins with Welles narrating Kafka's parable "Before the Law" to pinscreen scenes created by the artists Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker.
After the detectives leave, Josef converses with his landlady, Mrs. Grubach, and neighbor, Miss Bürstner, about the strange visit.
That evening, Josef attends the opera, but is abducted from the theater by a police inspector and taken to a courtroom, where he attempts in vain to confront the still-unstated case against him.
After brief encounters with the wife of a courtroom guard and a roomful of condemned men awaiting trial, Josef is granted an interview with Hastler, which proves unsatisfactory.
On the evening before his thirty-first birthday, Josef is apprehended by two executioners and taken to a quarry pit, where he is ordered to remove some of his clothing.
[5] In 1960, Welles was approached by producer Alexander Salkind to make a film from a public domain literary work.
Salkind had originally wanted Welles to make a film of Nikolai Gogol's novella Taras Bulba.
When Salkind found out that producer Harold Hecht was already making a version of Taras Bulba with Yul Brynner in the lead, he offered Welles a list of 82 other film titles to choose from.
Welles also modernized several aspects of the story, introducing computer technology and changing Miss Bürstner's profession from a typist to a cabaret performer.
Welles also opened the film with a fable from the book about a man who is permanently detained from seeking access to the Law by a guard.
The film ends with the smoke of the fatal dynamite blast forming a mushroom cloud in the air while Welles reads the closing credits on the soundtrack.
It was intentional on Orson's part: He had these three gorgeous women (Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli) trying to seduce this guy, who was completely repressed and incapable of responding.
"[10] Film critic Roger Ebert theorized that this "could be interpreted as a nightmare in which women make demands [Josef] K is uninterested in meeting.
[12] British actor Peter Sallis was brought in to dub Max Haufler's dialogue, which had been delivered in Hungarian, into American-accented English.
[9] Welles was not able to film The Trial in Kafka’s home city of Prague, as his work was seen as decadent by the communist government in Czechoslovakia.
"[9] Welles edited The Trial in Paris while technically on vacation; he commuted in on weekends from Málaga, Spain, where he was taking time to film sequences (reported as being "the prologue and epilogue") for his self-financed film adaptation of Don Quixote, to oversee the post-production work.
[14] In a later interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Anthony Perkins stated that Welles gave him the direction that The Trial was meant to be seen as a black comedy.
In an interview with the BBC, he mentioned that on the eve of the premiere he jettisoned a ten-minute sequence (it is actually about six minutes long) where Josef K. meets with a computer scientist (played by Greek actress Katina Paxinou) who uses her technology to predict his fate.
[18] Charles Higham's 1970 biography of Welles dismissed the film as "an agonizing experience [...] a dead thing, like some tablet found among the dust of forgotten men, speaking a language that has much to say to us, but whose words have largely been rubbed away.
[3] Film critic Leonard Maltin gave The Trial a rating of 3 and a half out of 4 stars and described it as "[g]ripping, if a bit confusing" and "not for all tastes.