Is the serious Orson Welles ripe for reexamination? By the time he made the Trial, he was merely laying claim to the international art film he’d done so much to found. The undeniable stylistic verve, the sly quoting of the decade’s big filmmakers, and the narrative ambiguity gave the fish-eye lenses and low angle ceiling shots a new vitality.
Eventually, however, auteurists and film scholars began to value a different Welles - the classicist of Kane of Ambersons, or the thinking man’s noir filmmaker of Touch of Evil or Lady from Shanghai. Even the Shakespearean adaptations seem to have more aesthetic currency than the overly serious Mr. Arkadin and The Trial. And at least the former has a noir scaffolding to hang its pretensiousness on. (Perhaps for that reason it’s my favorite.)
I don’t dispute this critical consensus, and watching The Trial is not easy. The narrative has uneven trajectory, and the dialogue is abstracted from any referent. Except for certain sections, its focus does not gel. But what a fascinating, brilliant mess. Anthony Perkins is very good, and Jeanne Moreau is a treat. The use of existing sets in Paris outdoes Alphaville in transformative imagination. The Alexander Alexeiff pinscreen prologue is wonderfully evocative. I had seen this film, years ago, but on watching again, it seemed new and unfamiliar.
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