The Trial (1962) ***

Directed by Orson Welles. With Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau and Akim Tamiroff. An ambitious, baroque adaptation of Franz Kafka’s classic tale about a low-rank bureaucrat who finds himself arrested and ordered to stand trial - without ever finding out why. Presenting a dark, decayed and distorted labyrinth-like world of paranoia and deceit, Welles has created a visual tour-de-force, closer in spirit to the surrealist and experimental films of the 40’s and 50’s than to his own illustrious oeuvre.