Orson Welles, The Trial (1962), DCP

“The best film I ever made,” said Orson Welles of his 1962 freewheeling, frightening adaptation of Franz Kafka’s THE TRIAL, the now-infamous tale of a man caught in an ever-spiraling cycle of nightmarish bureaucratic alienation. And we are bound to agree with Orson. It stars a meek and baffled Anthony Perkins, fresh off his star-making role as the face of mother-derived guilt, Norman Bates, in Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960). Here, in the world of Welles’s baroque geometric compositions, he proves just as adept at conveying the father-derived guilt unique to Kafka. If you don’t know the story, here’s all you need to know: somebody has “ratted out” Josef K (Perkins) because one morning he wakes up to find that he is under arrest. His crime? He doesn’t know. No one wants to tell him. He should know already. We, the audience, don’t know either. That is, until it is too late. It is the crime of all of us: the crime of being born, of having parents, of existence.