Northwest Film Forum

In 1962, when the noir style was in decline, Welles agreed to direct a black-and-white adaptation of Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL. It wasn’t Welles’s first choice for a Kafka adaptation—he preferred THE CASTLE—but he called the end result “the finest film I have ever made.” The film was so successful in combining the elements of noir and Kafka that it came to define the term "Kafkaesque." Josef K (Anthony Perkins) is arrested for an undisclosed crime by police straight out of a "B" movie. The search for justice, or at least an explanation, leads him past desolate Zagreb apartment blocks to the abandoned Gare d’Orsay, a shifting maze of offices and vast halls inhabited by bureaucrats and the condemned waiting for fate to call their number. Balancing the baroque expressionism of Welles’ visual style are a script and performances—including the squirming Perkins and Welles as the Advocate—that emphasize the affinity between nightmare and comedy.

"Given the impact of screen size on what he’s doing, you can’t claim to have seen this if you’ve watched it only on video." -Jonathan Rosenbaum