Rating: 
Summary: horror-piece extravaganza
Review: For chilling spin-wrenching, gut-curling, tear-jerking, blood-clotting entertainment you definitely must watch The Trial. It is a bloody masterpiece. Anthony Perkins is at his where'd-my-sanity-a-go-go best.
Rating:
Summary: Injustice For All...
Review: Have you ever been accused of doing something you didn't do? How about being accused, arrested, tried, convicted, and executed, without ever finding out what any of the charges against you actually are? Sound like a nightmare? It is. A brilliant nightmare, brought to dark, suffocating life by Orson Welles. Anthony "Psycho" Perkins is great as the poor slob Josef K, who wakes from dreamland, only to be thrust into the horrors of his reality. He is confronted by "secret police" types, who answer his questions with questions, and turn his words inside out. Soon, friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers become suspicious eyes on him. Josef K has had a guilty conscience since boyhood. It is used against him in a diabolical conspiracy of increasing insanity! The more he tries to escape the snare, the tighter it gets. This is a film of terrifying images and strangling paranoia. Even if you forget the dialogue, the cold stone and shadows of "The Trial" will haunt you...
Rating: 
Summary: a powerful vision of Kafka's work
Review: I first saw this on a late night movie show on an obscure UHF station in the early eighties. I was very surprised to see anyone even tried to make a movie of this novel. It's amazing how effectively Welles adapts the very surreal masterpiece by Franz Kafka. Trying to present this in a standard, linear storyline is impossible so, instead, Welles does a superb job recreating the atmosphere of the novel with outstanding cinematography. The performances are excellent as well.The reason I gave it four stars instead of five is I don't know how comprehensible the storyline would be without reading the book. I read the book before seeing the movie so I'll never know the answer but it's something for a potential buyer to consider.
Rating:
Summary: So far ahead of its time, it's standing behind you.
Review: I had the great fortune of seeing this film on the big screen (even though it was shot on a much smaller format than regular movies - I don't know the technical reason why) recently, and it was breathtaking. This is one of those movies from which you emerge as if from sleep, for, as Welles himself notes in the introductory section, "it has the logic of a dream." Welles' technical mastery plays as big a part in the overall quality of the film as any of the acting or the script itself. Without the aid of THX or other sound technology, he achieves a reality of effect, with conversations fading and moving with the characters, which, although difficult to hear sometimes, is nevertheless impressive. The acting is successful in that the periphery characters are really very good in their eccentric parts and Perkins, who is in virtually every scene, portrays all the emotional and psychological complexity and confusion of a man in his situation effortlessly. I would put this film in the realm of David Lynch, but less dependent on graphic sex and violence. In fact, Welles' use of light and shadow, his juxtaposition of Gothic and modern architecture, and even simply the movement of the camera all work seamlessly to create one psychological (if subconscious) whole. It takes some lustre off of Lynch's shine and makes "Pi" look just plain amateurish. I only gave it four stars because for all its merit, it is an extraordinarily difficult movie to follow, and (as a reflection of Kafka's own work) somewhat indeterminate in its essential significance. Nevertheless, it's one of the best I've ever seen.
Rating:
Summary: One of Welles's best cinematic triumphs.
Review: I have yet to see such a dazzling display of cinematic genius in film that is better than "The Trial". The direction is beautiful. The plot is interesting but sometimes drags a bit. When I had purchased "The Trial" on video, I originally thought it was going to be a courtroom drama; but I was splendidly surprised when I saw what it really was. Anothony Perkins's performance in "The Trial" almost surpasses his ever-famous Norman Bates character. This film is a definite contender for "Citizen Kane" in my book, and just ahead of "Touch of Evil". The only problem with the film is the ending that sort of falls flat.
Rating:
Summary: This will remind you of leaving an apartment!
Review: I try to leave and cannot without a price, but thus it is with Joseph K! As an unpleasant nurse, Romy Schneider tastes good in my eyes.
Rating:
Summary: I'm so glad about this DVD...
Review: I'm thrilled with The Milestone Collection for doing this DVD. There are many movies that are in dire need of a proper release (on video -and- DVD) and Welles 'The Trial' was certainly one of these. The only copies that were available prior to this was a number of very bad public domain copies that were almost unwatchable, with terrible sound and picture quality. This DVD changes all that and finally presents the film to a home viewing audience how it should be presented. The funding for this picture came from French pockets, and so it is the only film he made aside from Citizen Kane in which he enjoyed total creative control, without studio interference. Welles himself said that this was the greatest picture that he'd ever made, and I think I might even be inclined to agree with him. If you're a fan of Welles, you will love this. If you're a fan of Franz Kafka AND Welles, than this is exactly what your looking for. A brilliant, stunning film, that finally looks brilliant and stunning.
Rating:
Summary: Welles vs. Kafka
Review: In a word: wierd. Which isn't too surprising since The Trial was directed by the always interesting--and iconoclastic--Orson Welles, based on a novel by Franz "Metamorphosis" Kafka and stars Anthony "Psycho" Perkins as Joseph K. (Kyle MacLachlan took on the role in the 1993 remake). I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen Welles' The Stranger (1946) or Touch of Evil (1958) beforehand (or Citizen Kane, for that matter). Those movies make a lot more narrative sense and represent a less difficult introduction to The World of Welles. Perkins' embodiment of the constantly beleaguered K. is more restrained than I would've thought, however, which helps to ground the film in some--very loose--semblance of normality. Welles (Albert Hastler, i.e. "The Advocate") actually gives the more bizarre performance, since he whispers the entire time. He also speaks the end credits (in a non-whisper) instead of letting the words scroll down the screen (as he also did in The Magnificent Ambersons). The film features a number of other odd touches like that. According to Barbara Leaming's "Orson Welles: A Biography", it wasn't Welles' idea to adapt Kafka's book in the first place; Miguel and Alexander Salkind brought it to him as an inexpensive production since the material was in the public domain. Although Kafka never tells the reader whether K. is guilty or not (of the unnamed crime with which he's been charged), Welles does. Which is likely to please fans of his work more than Kafka's...
Rating:
Summary: "The logic of a dream...of a nightmare..."
Review: Orson Welles' eccentric, ornery film adaptation of THE TRIAL is a work charged with protean ironies and stark insights, and the fifty years that separated the making of the film from the writing of the novel can account for much of this. Not especially sympathetic to the author's more esoteric spiritual concerns, and put off by what he saw as Kafka's apparent pre-Auschwitz naïveté, Welles simplified the book, distilling it as a forceful Expressionist allegory on the theme of personal responsibility in the face of arbitrary, amoral persecution. In the film, the inspectors who arrest Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) are waggish heavies out of hardboiled pulp detective fiction. These characters speak in the salty Americanized vernacular of J. Edgar Hoover's G-men with self-satirizing tough-guy talk like "don't you worry 'bout that, mister!" and "you wouldn't want to be one of them troublemakers, now would you?" Even the examining magistrate deadpans like a sly caricature of Joe Friday and suggests that any further action pertaining to K.'s complaints should be conducted "down at the station." Adapting Kafka to the idiom of 1950s B-movies and sensational television drama, K.'s initial arrest is presented in the hip, edgy, anarchic style of Hollywood gangster films, and staged in much the same manner as the third-degree interrogation of the Mexican shoe-store clerk, Manolo Sanchez, in TOUCH OF EVIL. Indeed, K.'s protests of "invasion of privacy" and "rank abuse of civil rights" suggest the paranoid atmosphere of McCarthyism and the underhanded investigative methods of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Welles had originally intended to compose his film in the classic manner of German Expressionism, designing elaborate sets and orchestrating lighting and mise-en-scène in the controlled environment of a studio. But this was not feasible since adequate funding was unavailable, and Welles was forced to shoot the exteriors ad hoc in the utilitarian style of the Italian Neorealist filmmakers. Some Kafka purists were disappointed that Welles shot the scenes of K.'s arrest among the new Tito-era Socialist architecture of Zagreb rather than around the older buildings dating back to the antebellum years of the waning Habsburg régime. And there is one extraordinary shot early on in the film, apparently done in a single extended take, which features a crippled woman dragging a trunk across a barren field which recalls Polanski's TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE as well as the absurdist chamber-drama of Samuel Beckett. Welles' treatment of the Initial Interrogation opens with K. sitting in a spacious, two-tiered hall that bears an uncanny resemblance to the old Berlin Reichstag. Here, K.'s "trial" seems to reflect the historical origins of National Socialism. Later, we see masses of shabbily attired, sad-faced old men - "the accused" - standing around dumbly in the vast, cavernous antechambers of the Law, in perpetual anticipation of the judges. At one point, they even appear as a forest of half-naked bodies with numbered placards around their necks like a Gustave Doré illustration of Dante's Inferno, depicting the condemned souls at the tribunal of Minos or the resurrected in the Valley of Jehosephat on the Day of Judgment. But it is later still - deep within the bowels of the law court offices, receding into infinity like the bewildering geometric arabesques of an M. C. Escher drawing or Spinoza's mathematically structured universe - that Josef K. first gets a taste of what lies in store for all accused men. And it seems hardly a coincidence that this haunting scene was filmed at Gare d'Orsay, a now-defunct railway station in Paris where thousands of European Jews were deported to Nazi death camps little more than twenty years earlier. In the restored version of THE TRIAL, the sequence of events accords more faithfully with that of the book and K.'s meeting with the priest takes place shortly after his dismissal of the Advocate. Welles turns the Advocate's lair into an arcane mausoleum, which all at once evokes Solomon's temple, Prospero's island, Faust's study, Borges' Library of Babel, and Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu. One gets the impression that the books gathering dust on the shelves were written by Jehovah Himself - inscribed by lightening flashes and to be read accordingly in the hallowed sanctuary of the Law. The Advocate takes over the pedagogical function of the priest in Kafka's novel but he is a decidedly less sympathetic figure, and the director's broad characterization has more than just a few shades of Hank Quinlan, the corrupt, evidence-planting border-town sheriff in TOUCH OF EVIL. The parable, "Before the Law," is demonstrated this time through the use of "visual aids" like a parody of Rod Serling's gnomic didacticism in THE TWILIGHT ZONE or the corny, leaden deus-ex-machina device of the windbag psychiatrist who conveniently "explains" everything at the end of PSYCHO. K.'s silhouette takes the place of the man from the country, thus completing the meaning of the opening prologue and giving the film a certain thematic continuity and symmetry - even an element of Brechtian "alienation" and self-reflexive mimesis, as well as a Godardian circularity of logic. Welles' presentation of the final execution takes a decidedly different tone than Kafka's original. For example, the (somewhat overemphatic) appropriation of Albinoni's apocryphal "Adagio in G Minor" gives Josef K.'s death march a certain majesty and melancholy grandeur, and this deliberate use of early baroque music as a kind of tragic requiem leitmotiv is rather reminiscent of the films of Pasolini. Like his character in LA RICOTTA, Welles criticizes the "average man" for his hypocrisy and spiritual poverty - a sentiment not far removed from the Marxist-Catholic-homosexual Pasolini's own radical contention that "a member of the bourgeoisie, whatever he does, is always wrong."
Rating:
Summary: Welles at his brilliant infuriating best!!
Review: Presumably this film has been put out to capitalise on the recent 'Citizen Kane' re-issues, although anyone who expects another film like Kane is in for a big shock!
This is a confused, confusing, brave and brilliant jewel of a movie, and as such it is as likely to enrage and confuse as much as endear itself to an audience. Although obviously based on Kafka's novel, the creative energy behind this film is 100% Welles. As for Welles, I suppose you either love him or hate him, but it's usually an extreme either way...
The amazon.com film synopsis by Tom Keogh for the storyline, is commendable, but he downplays what to me is the film's greatest strength; the philosophical and allegorical atmosphere pervading the entire piece. This is what welds this film to the memory. If you want an external TV reference point to this film, then the final episode of 'The Prisoner' would be the nearest.
So be aware that this is not commercial stuff! Welles himself had problems with finance for the project, and it was filmed in Paris and Zagreb for economy reasons. Interestingly, Welles considered this film his finest achievement, and audiences and film scholars have been arguing about whether he was joking or not ever since.
Due to the box office and critical disaster that this film was, the master negative has long been considered lost. I myself have had to make do with dreadful VHS copies of theatrical prints which had probably been used previously as car fan belts, so it's a relief to see that this DVD is of good quality (In the UK it's only the Studio Canal / Warners version that's available), with lots of the contrast that this film depends on for its effect. Having said that it hasn't had the loving care lavished on it that Kane has. Not surprising, really...
If you enjoy films challenging, uncompromising, and obstinately refusing to meet an audience even close to halfway, than this film is for you. If on the other hand you watch films for entertainment only, this one will make you feel mad and/or sleepy. This is mandatory viewing for anyone who admires Welles though, I for one heartily recommend this film. Watch it with sensitivity, and you'll find it a truly unforgettable experience in a number of ways.
Better than Kane? I'm not even going to go there...!
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