The Trial Review
In this 1962 production, director Orson Welles uses the same black-and-white palette that made him famous in Citizen Kane to paint a surreal portrait of an ordinary man lost in the abyss of a totalitarian legal system. The plot is simple: Police arrest bank clerk Joseph K (Anthony Perkins) but refuse to tell him why. Citizen K then spends the rest of the film trying to exonerate himself. The theme of the film is the individual's powerlessness against the tyranny of a super state -- or any other force over which meager man has no control. The novel on which Welles based the film -- Franz Kafka's 1925 masterpiece -Der Prozess (-The Trial) -- used that theme to foreshadow the monstrous injustice of the fascist dictatorships of the 1930s. In the film, Welles follows Citizen K on his odyssey through a labyrinthine legal system that calls to mind the nine circles of Dante's Inferno. To intensify Citizen K's alienation, Welles isolates him in cavernous courtrooms and shadowy streets as K attempts to vindicate himself. Though unrelievedly gloomy, the motion picture has moments of off-the-wall humor. Citizen K's lawyer, for example, is Welles himself, a bedridden good-for-nothing whose nurse has webbed fingers. As K pursues justice, one can almost picture Welles behind the camera gleefully prodding his woebegone marionette deeper and deeper into his maze of despair. At the height of his frustration, K runs through a dark corridor with decaying walls admitting slivers of light that prick his sanity. Perkins exhibits the right mix of confusion, vulnerability, and rebellion to present his character as a hapless victim. Because the film sometimes looks more like a Dali painting than a motion picture, many critics dismissed it as trumpery after it debuted. Decades later, however, some critics took a second look at it, concluding that it was a work of genius. The consensus today is that there is no consensus. Depending on the viewer's tastes and perspective, The Trial is either supremely boring or supremely fascinating. Mike Cummings, Rovi
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