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SHOWING WITH:
CONFIDENTIAL REPORT (MR. ARKADIN)

starring
TONY PERKINS
JEANNE MOREAU
and ORSON WELLES

(1962) Anthony Perkins' Joseph K enters a nondescript door and an immense crowd rises to its feet; two detectives beat a third in a tiny room lit by a single, swinging bulb; and in a gigantic office the desks stretch on, and on... Orson Welles' view of Kafka's posthumous (1925) classic of meaningless persecution Der Prozess changes the ending ("I couldn't put my name to a work that implies man's ultimate surrender. Being on the side of man, I had to show him in his final hour undefeated"), rearranges the plot (the book's 10 chapters filmed in this order: 1, 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 8, 7, 9, 10), but remains faithful to the incidents within those parameters; while stylistically attaining some of the most baroque effects of Welles's career, cutting from Stalinist apartment blocks in Zagreb (including 800 typists in a single room) to the seeming endless nooks, crannies, and cavernous vaults of the vast, deserted Gare d'Orsay in Paris (an emergency substitute after his even more bizarre original conception - interconnected sets dissolving in the course of the film to nothingness - couldn't be funded), while Albinoni's Adagio for Organ and Strings plays both forwards and backwards on the soundtrack.

A work both uniquely personal (Welles dubbed 11 of the characters himself while it was "closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I've ever made") and uniquely divided ("Kafka's novel presents a rather realistically described world - but it is inhabited by dream people...In Welles' film real people inhabit a nightmare world." - Elliott Stein), this was his first film since Citizen Kane to be released as he intended. With Jeanne Moreau as a sullen nightclub entertainer, Romy Schneider as a web-fingered, eager-to-please "nurse," a band of feral nymphettes, and Alexander Alexeïeff's hypnotic "pinscreen animation" prologue. "An astonishing work, and a revelation of the man." - David Thomson.

A MILESTONE FILMS RELEASE.
Milestone Film THE TRIAL Page

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Selections From Amazon.com:

This is Orson Welles by Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Rosenbaum (Editor)

The Story of Orson Welles by David Thomson

Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow

The Trial by Franz Kafka

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