In the Toils of the Law

The Trial. "The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude one another." This slyly smiling sentence, inserted by Franz Kafka in the final pages of The Trial, holds a subtle point at the throat of any man so rash as to interpret the most eerie and profound of all the fables written by the apocalyptic insurance clerk of Prague. Is The Trial a psychotic nightmare, the case history of a persecution complex, an allegory on the theme of justice, a prophetic vision of the totalitarian state, an analysis of Man's relation to the Absolute?

Orson Welles, who wrote and directed the first film version of Kafka's masterpiece, has wisely declined to decide. He accepts every possible interpretation as a limb of the author's allegorical monster, as a circle of the Hell in whose image he imagined man is made. Into this pit, his cameras rolling like the eyes of Lucifer, Welles plunges with tartarean energy; and if he cannot quite get to the bottom of it all he nevertheless comes up with a film of infernal brilliance, perhaps the most exciting picture he has made since The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

A bat in a blackout is easier to follow than Kafka's story line, but Welles keeps right on its tail. One fine morning, "without having done anything wrong," a bank clerk named Joseph K. (Tony Perkins) is arrested--or is it all just a bad dream? Two plainclothesmen burst into his bedroom, order him to dress, refuse to say what law he has broken, badger him for bribes, steal his best shirts, subject him to an apparently pointless "interrogation." And then breeze off, leaving K. in a sweat. Were they really plainclothesmen--or were they crooks? Is he really arrested--or is the whole affair a practical joke? "I've done nothing wrong," he reflects uneasily, "and still I feel guilty."

Nothing happens for a while, and K. breathes easier. Then suddenly he is summoned to a "hearing." He arrives--but what sort of court is this? It sits in a dingy old loft. Its "lawbooks" are filled with pornographic pictures. The examining magistrate gets K.'s case all mixed up with the case of a house painter. To conduct his defense, K. retains an advocate (Orson Welles). But while the old earwig is mumbling about legal problems, K. sneaks off with his chambermaid (Romy Schneider), a sexy witch with webbed fingers who takes him for a tumble in a pile of old legal papers.

Weeks pass. The advocate sleeps all day, does nothing about K.'s case. K. discharges him and takes counsel with an artist who paints portraits of the judges. The artist explains that he has influence only with the lowest tribunals: "The Highest Court is inaccessible."

Weeks pass. K. meets "the prison chaplain," who tells him an orphic tale about a man who begs admittance at the door of the Law but is refused. "Try to get in if you wish," the guard invites him, "but note that I am powerful.'' Intimidated, the man sits by the open door for days, months, years. At the end of his life the doorkeeper tells him casually: "This door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it." Darkness fills the man's eyes. In the darkness he perceives "a radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law." He dies.

K. himself dies soon afterward. Two fat strangers come calling and take him to a quarry at the edge of town. In the book one of them strangles him while the other drives a knife into his heart and twists it twice--"Like a dog!" K. says as he dies. In the film they dynamite him, and out of the stone pit rises a small cloud shaped like a mushroom.

The analogy is trite, to say the least, but it is also valid. Welles often belabors the author's meaning, but nowhere betrays it, even though he tries too hard to keep the story hoppin' like Hellzapoppin, galloping like a nightmare. Like Kafka, Welles adapts the methods of nightmare to narrative. Time at times turns rubber in his hands, and images live a violent private life; even Welles has seldom matched the visual bravura of The Trial. Much of the film was shot on one of the most spectacular sets a camera ever saw: the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris. Once the great terminal was a cast-iron cathedral of transport. Now it is a colossal hunk of Victorian junk, a sagging cavern, dim and vast, that dribbles dainty stalactites of iron filigree: a world like Kafka's world, a dead world waiting for the wrecker's ball.

The Welles of several years ago would surely have run wild in such a setting. In The Trial, setting and camera steadily subserve the subject. So do the actors--even Orson. As the advocate he has a small part and the grace to play it small . . . as small, that is to say, as a man his size can play anything. As the director he coaxes some entrancing episodes from Romy Schneider and a good low bit from Jeanne Moreau. And he gets more out of Tony Perkins than there is in him. This resolutely cute young man, the sweater-boy wonder of the fan-mag industry, is surely an improbable archetype of the Anxious Age; but in scene after scene Welles rolls him up like an empty toothpaste tube and squeezes till the right expression pops out of his face.

The Trial is by no means a great film. It is founded on an esthetic fallacy--the proposition that a camera can see what is unseeable: Meaning, Being, Mystery. But when Welles makes a mistake he makes it on a grand scale and in the grand manner. He is one of the greatest natural talents that ever looked through a lens, and The Trial gives vivid evidence that the prodigal is still a prodigy.

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