the trial (1962)
Thinking about The Trial again, and I was fortunate
to see it again fairly recently, two questions came to me:
Did Terry Gilliam see The Trial before he made
Brazil?
And
Did Patrick MacGoohan see The Trial before he made
The Prisoner?
Visually The Trial is absolutely distinctive, one of
the few movies that you could recognize from virtually any frame. Tony
Perkins is of course perfect casting for Josef K, and he actually acts
the part as opposed to falling into the Tony Perkins impression with
which he earned his living later on (in Murder on the Orient Express,
for example). The rest of the cast is good as well (Jeanne Moreau as
Miss Burstner, Welles as Hastler the Advocate, Akim Tamiroff as
Block), but the film succeeds or fails on Perkins and he carries it
off.
Second billing behind Perkins should probably go to
the sets. Unlike Gilliam’s Brazil, Welles didn’t have the budget to
build anything, but he found some amazing locations in several
different countries, mostly emphasizing both towering size and
labyrinthine confusion. The main location he used was the Gare
d’Orsay, a deserted railroad station in Paris which has since been
turned into a museum.
The Trial is much more directly comparable to Brazil
than The Prisoner, but both comparisons are interesting. In contrast
with Brazil (and Kafka, for that matter), K is defiant to the end. He
is doomed, but he dies on his own terms.
The Prisoner is more like the flip side of The
Trial. Rather than sets and people being overtly threatening
and ominous, MacGoohan takes a type of setting that is extremely sunny
and familiar (at least to English audiences) and makes it threatening
by adding just a few jarring notes of incongruity. And, of course,
Number Six is always unbending (unlike Josef K, who always seems to
feel as if he might possibly be guilty of whatever it is he’s being
accused of), and finally is more or less victorious.
In any case, The Trial is one of Welles’ best films,
definitely worth seeing.