Le Procès (1962) - film review

Up and coming business executive Joseph K wakes up one morning to find a police inspector in his room.  The inspector informs him that he is under arrest but will not tell him what crime he has committed.  When Joseph K states that he intends to file a complaint, the policeman goes away.  Later, whilst enjoying an evening at the theatre, Joseph K is contacted by the police inspector again and led to a cavernous court room to stand trial.  Having delivered an impassioned speech to the court, Joseph K leaves the court room but soon discovers that his drama is far from over...

Despite all the bad press it has received, Orson Welles’ Le Procès (a.k.a. The Trial) is one of the great cinematrographic achievments of the Twentieth Century.  It is a film that has until recently been largely overlooked, probably as a result of the barrage of negative criticism which sunk the film when it was first shown in the mid 1960s.

Part of the reason for the film’s perceived failure is that it does not offer a faithful adaptation of the famous Franz Kafka novel on which it is based.  Rather than adhere closely to Kafka’s vision of a self-induced nightmare of guilt and neurosis, Welles refashions it for his own purposes.

The director’s societal concerns are brilliantly reflected, including his distaste for the legal system, with its inherent corruption and obfuscation, and the soul-destroying drive towards uniformity from the large corporations.   Whereas Kafka is uncertain whether his protagonist Joseph K is guilty or innocent, Welles has no such doubts.  In his film, Joseph K is the emblem of a flawed society, a capitalist with no time for family ties and who builds his career on the backs of an army of drones sitting at their desks typing away.   With that in mind, it is unfair to make comparisons between Welles’ film and Kafka’s novel.  The two are both individually works of genius, but for very different reasons.

This is certainly Welles’ least accessible film.  The photography and the dialogue move so quickly that it is impossible to take in everything, although that was probably Welles’ intention.  As the drama shifts quickly between markedly different scenes, with dialogue that appears bewilderingly incongruous and often banal, the spectator feels himself caught up in a free-flowing nightmare, never sure what is going to happen next.

Some of the cinematography is astounding.  With widespread use of huge location sets (which include the then disused Gare d’Orsay in Paris), filmed mostly in semi-darkness, with lighting creating disturbing shadowy images in the background, the film quickly mesmerises its audience.  There is an ever-present sense of menace which invites some sympathy for the film’s lead character (played brilliantly by Anthony Perkins, of Psycho fame), even if he often appears nauseatingly obnoxious and self-satisfied.

However, it is the film’s disturbing surrealistic imagery which provides the most memorable moments.  These include: the scene where Josef K hassles a crippled woman dragging a heavy chest across what resembles an industrial wasteland; the scene where Josef K strolls down a hall filled with rows of desks at which clerks sit typing incessantly; and, most spectacularly of all, the scene near the end of the film where Josef K runs desperately down a corridor, blinded by the light breaking through the cracked wooden walls.

Welles himself regarded this as his best film and in many ways it is.  Although the narrative is less coherent and satisfying than in, say, Citizen Kane, visually the film is a monumental achievement.  Although perhaps a little too self conscious in places, the film reveals a director with not just a mastery of the medium of film but an astounding breadth of imagination and eloquence of expression.

© James Travers 2000

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