I have just finished rereading Franz Kafka’s brilliant book, “The Trial” first published in 1925. Then I realized that I have a DVD copy based on Kafka’s “The Trial” and with the same name, yet unseen in a heap of DVD’s, by none other than Orson Welles. After watching the Welles movie, released in 1962, I believe that the great film maker presents Kafka’s ideas almost flawlessly and even improves on them. For anyone interested in politics, or the subjects of totalitarianism, the loss of individualism, the loss of freedom, both the Kafka book and the Welles movie based on it are of course essential.
Before considering the Welles movie, a few words must be mentioned about the Kafka book. Recall that Kafka, a Central European Jew based in Prague who wrote in German (the book’s German title is Der Prozess), never intended for this work (or many of his other masterpieces) to be published. It was published, unfinished by Kafka’s friend, Max Broad over Kafka’s express declaration that it should be burned. The sections of the book were titled by Kafka but not put in any order and some of the sections themselves were unfinished. Fragments of unfinished sections were also left behind by Kafka. Broad ordered the chapters into what he thought made sense (but of course his order has been challenged by some literary authorities including Professor Herman Uyttersprot). These details are all laid out in the Alfred A. Knopf, publisher, “Definitive Edition” published in 1965.
Without going further into these details, it is obvious that although the central theme of “The Trial” is straightforward, the book itself or Kafka’s own realization of it is anything but. This in turn provided fertile ground for a genius like Orson Welles who could take the essential elements of “The Trial” but tweak it in his own fashion to update it for contemporary audiences (Welles, for instance, introduces a computer into the film that does not exist back in the 1920’s)and to make it more filmworthy for audiences.
The basic plot is this: a young figure high up in a bank one day awakens at his lodgings and is arrested by nameless authorities who refuse to tell him what he is accused of or even when his trial will occur. Although put under arrest, K, the young bank clerk, is left to continue his occupation but must appear for various interrogations as demanded. The whole novel has a dreamlike, nightmarish quality to it with K in search of information about the nameless court entity that is pursuing him. His uncle, who hears of his plight, puts him in touch with a friend who is a lawyer(played by Welles in the movie). But this lawyer gives only ambiguous replies to the urgent questions of K and even seems at times to appear to be a functionary of the hidden court interested more in controlling his clients then defending them. K also attempts to secure more information about his case and the court through a variety of increasingly bizarre figures many of whom have physical defects (webbed hands; hunchbacks; a club-footed landlady doggedly dragging a trunk along an empty railroad track into the fading twilight) as if these people, all in touch with the court, have been disfigured by it. On the last day of K’s 30th birthday, a year after his arrest, two men seize K, walk him through the streets til they reach a quarry, and then execute him by stabbing him in the heart with a knife.
As happened through much of his career, Welles took classic stories, even from Shakespeare, and gave them his own interpretation. Welles very intelligently explained his position in a 1962 interview to the BBC at http://www.wellesnet.com/trial%20bbc%20interview.htm. Here is a segment of that interview conducted by Huw Weldon:
WHELDON: Do you have any compunction about changing a masterpiece?
WELLES: Not at all, because film is quite a different medium. Film should not be a fully illustrated, all talking, all moving version of a printed work, but should be itself, a thing of itself. In that way it uses a novel in the same way that a playwright might use a novel– as a jumping off point from which he will create a completely new work. So no, I have no compunction about changing a book. If you take a serious view of filmmaking, you have to consider that films are not an illustration or an interpretation of a work, but quite as worthwhile as the original.
WHELDON: So it’s not a film of the book, it’s a film based on the book?
WELLES: Not even based on. It’s a film inspired by the book, in which my collaborator and partner is Kafka. That may sound like a pompous thing to say, but I’m afraid that it does remain a Welles film and although I have tried to be faithful to what I take to be the spirit of Kafka, the novel was written in the early twenties, and this is now 1962, and we’ve made the film in 1962, and I’ve tried to make it my film because I think that it will have more validity if it’s mine.
For most filmmakers, that would be pompous but not for the larger than life Orson Welles whose 1941 classic, “Citizen Kane” has long been considered the best movie ever made. Welles also made other highly regarded films like “The Magnificent Ambersons” and “Touch of Evil”, a classic in the film noir genre. The latter is particularly significant here because it contains a drug induced dream sequence that eerily presages the dreamlike quality of “The Trial.” The bleakness and despair of “The Trial” in Welles hands even surpasses that of most film noir movies, even another Welles masterpiece, “Touch of Evil”. The outstanding actor Akim Tamiroff also plays in both movies (as does Orson Welles), with a memorable performance as “Uncle Joe” Grandi in “Touch of Evil” and with a brilliant portrayal of Block, the tradesman in “The Trial”.
Welles really does update and improve in many senses on the novel. For instance, he adds modern technology in the form of a computer to the plot, quite ingenious back in 1961-2 when computers were little more than adding machines. Welles creates a scene in which K’s Uncle visits K at the bank and K shows him a computer with the somewhat ominous suggestion that it will be important in future in things other than just calculations. The scene is very brief, less than a minute, but very suggestive of the role that modern technology and especially computers might play in watching over a state’s citizens. In fact, in the same interview to the BBC, Welles notes that the computer scene was intended to be much longer, almost 10 minutes long, but he cut most of the scene because, in Welles words:
Yes, that was a long scene that lasted ten minutes, which I cut on the eve of the Paris premiere. Joseph K has his fortune told by a computer–that’s what the scene amounted to. It was my invention. The computer tells him his fate [the computer predicts K will commit suicide]. I only saw the film as a whole once. We were still in the process of doing the mixing, and then the premiere fell on us. At the last moment I abridged the scene. It should have been the best in the film and it wasn’t. Something went wrong, I don’t know why, but it didn’t succeed. The subject of that scene was free will. It was tinged with black humor; that was my main weapon. As you know, it is always directed against the machine and in favor of freedom.
This comes out perfectly in the film because the tiny segment that remains is suggestive but not distracting. In short, a perfect bringing forward in terms of technology but well within the themes of alienation and man vs. the state embraced by the Kafka story. This is, of course, exactly what Welles intended: to modernize Kafka but not in any way disturb his vision.
Another stroke of genius provided by Welles is the music chosen to accompany the film. The film opens with the somber Adagio in G Minor by Albinoni; its funereal strains (complete with organ) serve as the underlying theme for the entire movie both opening and closing it and again underlining the bleakness and darkness of the society that K lives in. And what a dark world is shown by Welles: most of the film is shot at night with creepy but effective lighting, all evoking a nightmare. Even the daytime scenes (such as the opening when K “awakes” and is arrested) are in a cold, harsh light. Note too that the film opens in light and ends in darkness. The film overall is bleaker than the bleakest of film noirs, it approaches the status of a psychological horror movie.
Good stuff with the Albinoni music perfectly evoking the film’s somber nature and an excellent choice but fairly predictable in the hands of any competent director. Where Welles adds a touch of genius is to put in jazz music accompanying important scenes in the movie, especially the chase scene by the young girls before and after he sees the painter Titorelli. Of course, this kind of music was likely unknown and unwritten when Kafka was writing his story but with its loose improvisations, lack of precise beats and structure, it is perfect in accompanying and suggesting dreamlike sequences such as the one with the painter. It also “updates” the story and makes it more universal. Once again, Welles enhances Kafka’s vision.
Welles does the same thing with many of the sets in the movie. Whereas Kafka describes K’s bank offices as constrained and claustrophobic, in the Welles movie, the director presents enormous, industrial size sets. In fact, these were forced upon Welles because the sets he had ordered were not built on time and he ended up using an old train station in Paris as one of his central shooting sites and others in Zagreb, (then part of Yugoslavia) for others.
In the BBC interview, Welles explains how this happened:
WHELDON: Why did you shoot so much of the film in Yugoslavia?
WELLES: It seems to me that the story we’re dealing with is said to take place “anywhere”. But of course there is no “anywhere.” When people say that this story can happen anywhere, you must know what part of the globe it really began in. Now Kafka is central European and so to find a middle Europe, some place that had inherited something of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Kafka reacted, I went to Zagreb. I couldn’t go to Czechoslovakia because his books aren’t even printed there. His writing is still banished there.
WHELDON: Would you have gone to Czechoslovakia, were you able?
WELLES: Yes, I never stopped thinking that we were in Czechoslovakia. As in all of Kafka, it’s supposed to be Czechoslovakia. The last shot was in Zagreb, which has old streets that look very much like Prague. But you see, capturing that flavor of a modern European city, yet with it’s roots in the Austro-Hungarian empire wasn’t the only reason why we shot in Yugoslavia. The other reason was that we had a big industrial fair to shoot in. We used enormous buildings, much bigger than any film studio. There was one scene in the film where we needed to fit fifteen hundred desks into a single building space and there was no film studio in France or Britain that could hold fifteen hundred desks. The big industrial fair grounds that we found in Zagreb made that possible. So we had both that rather sleazy modern, which is a part of the style of the film, and these curious decayed roots that ran right down into the dark heart of the 19th century.
WHELDON: You shot a lot of the film in Paris, at an abandoned railway station, the Gare d’Orsay.
WELLES: Yes, there’s a very strange story about that. We shot for two weeks in Paris with the plan of going immediately to Yugoslavia where our sets would be ready. On Saturday evening at 6 o’clock, the news came that the sets not only weren’t ready, but the construction on them hadn’t even begun. Now, there were no sets, nor were there any studios available to build sets in Paris. It was Saturday and on Monday we we’re to be shooting in Zagreb! We had to cancel everything, and apparently to close down the picture. I was living at the Hotel Meurice on the Tuilleries, pacing up and down in my bedroom, looking out of the window. Now I’m not such a fool as to not take the moon very seriously, and I saw the moon from my window, very large, what we call in America a harvest moon. Then, miraculously there were two of them. Two moons, like a sign from heaven! On each of the moons there were numbers and I realized that they were the clock faces of the Gare d’Orsay. I remembered that the Gare d’Orsay was empty, so at 5 in the morning I went downstairs, got in a cab, crossed the city and entered this empty railway station where I discovered the world of Kafka. The offices of the advocate, the law court offices, the corridors– a kind of Jules Verne modernism that seems to me quite in the taste of Kafka. There it all was, and by 8 in the morning I was able to announce that we could shoot for seven weeks there. If you look at many of the scenes in the movie that were shot there, you will notice that not only is it a very beautiful location, but it is full of sorrow, the kind of sorrow that only accumulates in a railway station where people wait. I know this sounds terribly mystical, but really a railway station is a haunted place. And the story is all about people waiting, waiting, waiting for their papers to be filled. It is full of the hopelessness of the struggle against bureaucracy. Waiting for a paper to be filled is like waiting for a train, and it’s also a place of refugees. People were sent to Nazi prisons from there, Algerians were gathered there, so it’s a place of great sorrow. Of course, my film has a lot of sorrow too, so the location infused a lot of realism into the film.
WHELDON: Did using the Gare d’Orsay change your conception of the film?
WELLES: Yes, I had planned a completely different film that was based on the absence of sets. The production, as I had sketched it, comprised sets that gradually disappeared. The number of realistic elements were to become fewer and fewer and the public would become aware of it, to the point where the scene would be reduced to free space as if everything had dissolved. The gigantic nature of the sets I used is, in part, due to the fact that we used this vast abandoned railway station. It was an immense set.
So part of the Welles genius in this instance was simply overcoming the problems with sets (and financial budgets) that presented themselves. But notice that in the end, Welles changes, to me at least, seem to be improvements on Kafka. In particular his vast bank set with over 1,500 desks foreshadows the immensity and crushing power of totalitarianism. It is no coincidence that Nazi party festivities were on a huge scale, as were fascist buildings in Italy and fascist demonstrations for Il Duce: all was there to show the power of the movement and the party and this is conveyed beautifully by the vast sets that Welles ended up using. Of course, Kafka could not have known the specifics of this in the early 20’s but he surely was aware at the tendencies and he hints at it in the story with the all powerful nature of institutions like the nameless courts and the vast scale of people employed by them.
Another excellent refinement that Welles makes to Kafka’s story is the way he treats and shows the advocate or lawyer, which Welles himself plays brilliantly. In Kafka, the advocate is something of a vague character and we end up by fleshing him and his intentions out with our own imagination. In the film, Welles shows the lawyer as more of a villain, someone who terrorizes his own client (Block) the tradesman in a brilliant scene which hues fairly faithfully to the book but is visually startling. Welles also changes the story slightly to bring the advocate in later towards the ending, near climactic scene in the cathedral with the lawyer really playing a collaborator with the court and the state. Here Welles as the lawyer confronts K with the parable of the door clearly foretelling K’s own doom. So in the end, all of the people K has turned to for help, the painter, the tradesman, the priest, the lawyer, the lawyer’s maid, all turn out to be agent/collaborators of the nameless and hateful court/state which is acting against K. Welles even suggests Ploetzensee and Buchenwald in his film with defendants at one point standing under meat hooks. There can be no question, as Welles himself says to the BBC in the interview next quoted, that World War II and the final solution strongly influenced his ideas in the film. After Hitler’s atrocities, Kafka himself was not Kafkaesque enough for Welles.
But the biggest change that Welles makes to the Kafka story, and perhaps the most controversial, is the ending. In Kafka, the protagonist K is killed off by two thugs employed by the court by a thrust of a knife into K’s heart. Welles considered using that ending but rejected it because he felt, with the experience of World War II and Auschwitz, that it was inappropriate for the hero to die, in Kafka’s words, “Like a dog.”
The master explains this to the BBC in some detail:
HUW WHELDON: Your film, THE TRIAL, is based upon Franz Kafka’s stunning novel.
ORSON WELLES: Yes, I suppose you could say that, although you wouldn’t necessarily be correct. I’ve generally tried to be faithful to Kafka’s novel in my film but there are a couple of major points in my film that don’t correspond when reading the novel. First of all the character of Joseph K. in the film doesn’t really deteriorate, certainly doesn’t surrender at the end.
WHELDON: He certainly does in the book, he’s murdered in the book.
WELLES: Yes, he is murdered in the end. He’s murdered in our film, but because I fear that K may be taken to be a sort of everyman by the audience, I have been bold enough to change the end to the extent that he doesn’t surrender. He is murdered as anyone is murdered when they’re executed, but where in the book he screams, “like a dog, like a dog you’re killing me!,” in my version he laughs in their faces because they’re unable to kill him.
WHELDON: That’s a big change.
WELLES: Not so big, because in fact, in Kafka they are unable to kill K. When the two out of work tenors are sent away to a field to murder K, they can’t really do it. They keep passing the knife back and forth to one another. K refuses to collaborate in his own death in the novel, it’s left like that and he dies with a sort of whimper. Now in the film, I’ve simply replaced that whimper with a bang.
WHELDON: Did you ever think about ending the film with the two executioners stabbing K with the knife?
WELLES: No. To me that ending is a ballet written by a Jewish intellectual before the advent of Hitler. Kafka wouldn’t have put that in after the death of six million Jews. It all seems very much pre-Auschwitz to me. I don’t mean that my ending was a particularly good one, but it was the only possible solution. I had to step up the pace, if only for a few moments.
Perhaps it is also Welles’s own maverick character, his own sense of persecution from the powers that were in the American film industry after “Citizen Kane” (for which he was blacklisted in Hollywood) and also the American government, which hounded him out of the country and spyed on his every move (suspecting him of being a communist), which led him to also reject that ending. His hero is much more defiant, even challenging the assassins to stab him (and seemingly knowing that they are afraid to do so) and calling them cowards when they cannot. Notice too that Welles mentions in the BBC interview that his K does not deteriorate as the K does in Kafka’s novel. This too is an important variation on the book. In the novel, K becomes forgetful, irritable, and unreliable; not so in Welles hands. He wants to show that the anonymous court-state institution pursuing the protagonist does not warp or defeat K. At the same time, Welles keeps and gave a visual, pictorial display of the bleakness and despair that Kafka wrote about. The world Welles created is dark, threatening, violent, a place God has turned his back on. Indeed, the priest in the cathedral scene turns out to be more of a collaborator of the unjust and massive state apparatus than an agent of religion, just as K’s lawyer appears to be more a collaborator than a defender of the accused. Be forewarned that this film is quite shocking in its bleakness and despair–but so was Kafka. I don’t want to spoil the ending for people who have not seen the movie but suffice it to say that K meets his end by resisting and the outcome is ambiguous as to whether he dies, his assassins die, or all die together. At the end, Welles uses the symbolism (although he denies having used symbols at all in the movie) of a kind of mushroom cloud to suggest the destructive nature of modern totalitarianism. The final ending has Welles, in that beautiful baritone voice of his that is so distinctive, naming the players of his movie; a trademark of an Orson Welles movie. “I played the advocate and wrote and directed the film. My name is Orson Welles” tells it all.
The movie cost almost $2 million to make back in the early 1960’s and the cast has outstanding acting from Tony Perkins (“Psycho”), Akim Tamiroff and Romy Schneider, among others, as well as by Orson Welles himself in the critical role of K’s lawyer. What is striking is that this movie–made more than two decades after “Citizen Kane”–shows that the incredible genius of Orson Welles was not confined to one movie or two but continued throughout the course of his eventful but difficult life. For Welles was persecuted in his life even as K was in fiction by powerful forces for having challenged and questioned the makeup of a society, its politics, and how the American film industry operated. Perhaps it is Welles affinity in suffering with the Jewish outsider Kafka that makes Welles’s film so powerful a vision of the writer’s themes and moods. Welles took a classic story which in itself is disparate, disorganized, unfinished in parts and difficult to put together. He tweaked it (sometimes due to problems inherent in filmmaking as shown by the problem with the sets), modernized it, stamped his unique insights on it, and shaped it into a beautiful artwork which as a finished product perhaps exceeds even the genius of Kafka’s book.
In my opinion, “The Trial” by Orson Welles resides on almost the same plateau as “Citizen Kane”: it is that good. It is remarkable that this masterpiece is so little known and has been viewed by so few. But then, there was a systematic effort made by the forces of the right, by the Hearsts and their allies (including Hoover’s FBI), to not only destroy copies of “Citizen Kane” but to destroy Welles himself. They failed, just as K’s persecutor’s in his film did, although they made the life of both the fictitious K and the real Welles difficult. A good copy of the film is available on DVD from Passport International Productions circa 2002. Cheaper, one dollar or so copies are also available in mass stores but the sound and picture quality is generally poor.
Thank you Orson Welles for this magnificent film.