James Leggio
A reader might reasonably expect Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (1914–15) to be about, well, a trial. It’s widely known that Kafka was a trained lawyer and practiced his profession at an insurance company in Prague. And it’s true that the novel’s unfinished text as we have it does include one brief quasi-legal proceeding, a chaotic Preliminary Interrogation at which Joseph K. makes a speech disputing the legality of the hearing and asks, without success, to be told the charges against him.
But that’s all. The charges, if any, are never stated in an indictment, no actual courtroom trial is ever convened, we see no judge presiding over the case, there’s no jury, no items of evidence or lawyerly arguments are presented, no witnesses are called, examined, or cross-examined, and no verdict is read out.
Some hints point in a different direction. Kafka’s original German title for this work, Der Prozess, can mean “trial,” “litigation,” “process,” or “proceedings,” suggesting that the subject encompasses perhaps the broad nature of some ongoing process as a whole, rather than one particular, nonexistent trial.
Theodor Adorno was perhaps the first to bring out this aspect of the novel. Adorno wrote in his “Notes on Kafka” (1953; in Prisms, 1967, p.264):
The dialectic of expressionism in Kafka forces the novel-form ever closer to the serialized adventure story. Kafka loved such novels. By adopting their technique he at the same time dissociated himself from the established literary mores. To the list of his known literary models should be added . . . surely the beginning of Poe’s “Arthur Gordon Pym”. . .
Poe’s episodic adventure tale offers one line of inquiry into Kafka’s elliptical way with a story. Perhaps even more telling, Poe was also, in his C. Auguste Dupin tales, the inventor of the detective story as a literary genre. Adorno continues:
Above all, however, Kafka allied himself with apocryphal literary genres. Universal suspicion, a trait etched deeply into the physiognomy of the present age, he learned from the detective novel. In detective novels, the world of things has gained mastery over the abstract subject and Kafka uses this aspect to refashion things into ever-present emblems. The large works are rather like detective novels in which the criminal fails to be exposed.
Peter E. Gordon pursues this notion, even as he states his disagreement with Adorno (“Kafka’s Inverse Theology,” in Kafka’s “The Trial”: Philosophical Perspectives, 2018, p.36):
For Adorno, The Trial reinforces a modern sense of “universal suspicion” that Kafka, he claims, may have borrowed from the popular genre of detective fiction. . . . The paradigmatic event in a detective story is the discovery of a corpse, which becomes the focal point of an unfolding inquiry. . . . [But] Kafka’s tale works backward from the mystery of an accusation to the production of a corpse.
What Gordon suggests here, to put it a different way, is that the “normal” way of plotting a murder mystery resembles the long-running TV series Law and Order. As the statement at the beginning of each episode reminded us: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups: The police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.” There, the process is basically made up of two interdependent parts. Part 1: Virtually every episode of the series begins with the discovery of a corpse. NYPD homicide detectives then investigate, follow up on leads, gather evidence, and eventually arrest a suspect. Part 2: After a handoff from the police, the district attorney conducts a trial in which, through physical evidence and spoken testimony, the accused will be found either guilty or innocent.
This is precisely the two-part legal process that Kafka’s novel inverts. In Der Prozess, the police part of the “process” has been run backward, so that arrest of the suspect comes first, at the very beginning of the investigative action, without any preceding inquiry at all that the reader can see; and then, at the very end, there appears the unexplained corpse of an innocent murder victim, Joseph K. himself. No wonder the novel is so disconcerting.
The idea of the “process” consisting of a detailed series of legal proceedings may call to mind the midcentury crime novels of the police subgenre called procedurals, of which the leading example would be Ed McBain and his 87th Precinct series, beginning with Cop Hater (1956). In crime movies, a most notable instance is Jules Dassin’s famous procedural The Naked City (1948).
Concerning the reversal of the process, with the arrest first and the body last, take note of Steven Soderbergh’s film Kafka (1991). It tells a fictional story about Franz Kafka himself by incorporating themes and events from The Trial and The Castle, and it gets around this no-body-at-the-beginning problem by actually providing one at the very outset. The film opens with an unidentified man being murdered.
Rewriting The Trial as Kafka’s imaginary life story, however, doesn’t “solve” the novel. Rather, it accepts the novel as an impenetrable philosophical puzzle, consigning it to the category of what literary scholar James Richardson once called “the safely insoluble.”
My hunch is that looking at The Trial not as an insoluble philosophical mystery but rather as a “failed” detective story, with its head and tail unhelpfully reversed, may lead to different insights into the work. To test that hunch, we might consider in more detail how it may resemble the detective genre, especially within the film noir mode of which Orson Welles was an acknowledged master.
It might also be noted that in his insurance company day job, Kafka had a detective-like function. Like Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), he was charged with processing and investigating insurance compensation claims.
To explore the idea of The Trial as a “failed” detective story, let’s look at it as a highlight among Welles’s succession of investigative plots, from Citizen Kane, Journey into Fear, and The Stranger to Mr. Arkadin. As James Naremore wrote in The Magic World of Orson Welles (1978, p.195):
The Gothic political rally in Kane, the furtive conversations on the great oak staircase in Ambersons, the mad courtroom in The Lady from Shanghai, the police inquisition in Touch of Evil — all these celebrated moments are made possible by Kafka, or at least by the modern sensibility that Kafka largely created.
Failed Detectives and Trick Endings
As far as the characters in Citizen Kane are concerned, the mystery of Charles Foster Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” is never solved, and the investigative newspaper reporters fail in their stated quest for “‘Rosebud,’ dead or alive.” Only the audience is let in on the secret, in a shot near the very end. But Welles in later years expressed dissatisfaction with the whole idea of the Rosebud-brand sled being the key to Kane, calling it a mere “Freudian gag.” He was frequently eager to give his script coauthor, Herman J. Mankiewicz, all the credit (or faint praise) for that O. Henry–worthy surprise ending: “I was very lucky to work with Mankiewicz: everything concerning Rosebud belongs to him” (Mark W. Estrin, ed., Orson Welles: Interviews, 2002, p.123).
Yet maybe the film’s explicit solution of Rosebud is not the true one after all. In an article remembering his longtime friend Welles, Gore Vidal suggested that William Randolph Hearst’s fury against Kane largely came from a possible leak of private knowledge that Rosebud was Hearst’s pet name for the clitoris of Marion Davies, his mistress and the inspiration for Kane’s Susan Alexander. The jury’s still out on that one.
Nonetheless, Rosebud does have something important to say about the nature of mysteries in general and detective stories in particular.
As suggested above, there are basically two different kinds of mysteries. One is the detective (or “factual”) mystery, which is to say a mystery that can be solved if only we can obtain the necessary evidentiary data: What happened to Amelia Earhart? Who was the Zodiac serial killer? What is Rosebud?
The second kind is the speculative (or “philosophical”) mystery, which of its nature does not allow for a solution. For example: Why does an all-good, all-powerful god allow the innocent to suffer? What is the nature of “The Law” governing the human condition?
In fiction, the “factual” mystery is the domain of the traditional detective story, while the “philosophical” mystery is the domain of writers like Kafka. The great interest of Welles’s version of The Trial is the extent to which it manages to draw from both of these domains.
Welles’s aversion to the Rosebud storytelling trick was well-founded. The “factual” mystery story is like what some literary critics used to call, in a very different sense, a self-consuming artifact. The moment the puzzle is solved, the forces driving the case forward collapse into the deadly gasp of “Aha!” (or, if the storyteller is inept, “Oh, please!”). The solution to a factual mystery is like the punchline of a joke: the second after you deliver it, all the fun’s over. The tug of disappointment awaits us at big reveals like “The butler did it!” . . . “It’s the name of his sled!” . . . “The woman in the tower is the first Mrs. Rochester!” . . . “It’s Norman Bates in a dress!” As Peggy Lee once sang so eloquently, “Is that all there is?” Even the greatest of all fact-processing detectives, on his most famous case, revealed only that the supernatural hell-hound stalking the Baskervilles was in the end nothing more than a rather large dog tricked out with phosphorescent paint to glow in the dark. And then in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel there follows the long, tedious Retrospection chapter of “explanation,” as dreary and anticlimactic as the psychiatrist’s long, pedantic speech at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) factually “explaining” his diagnosis of the schizophrenic murderer Norman Bates.
The “philosophical” mystery story, though, which forestalls any consensus that it’s been “solved,” allows the storyteller to put off such moments of terminal letdown indefinitely, since a mystery without a solution, such as Kafka’s, can never end, even after the protagonist is dead. As the novel’s narrator says of K.’s last thoughts, “It was as if the shame of it must outlive him.”
But the questing detective, doomed to failure, must try anyway.
An Inspector Calls
After Welles’s voiceover reading of the parable “Before the Law” as a prologue, in the first scene proper of the film of The Trial the Chief Inspector barges in on the sleeping Joseph K. (Anthony Perkins), and is joined shortly after by his two Assistant Inspectors. They are as calm and insistent as dozens of other film noir detectives. Indeed, the Chief’s deep, gravelly voice delivers deadpan line readings in what amounts to a familiar, celebrated style of hardboiled “detective talk” that goes back to The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946) — and which would be satirized in turn, I would guess, by Eddie Constantine as the American private eye Lemmy Caution in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965).
Overall, the interrogation scene devolves into absurdity as the officials seek, through intimidating doubletalk, to sweat compromising information out of a suspect without divulging his alleged crime or what exactly, if anything, they’re looking for in going through his room.
Though the Chief Inspector eventually disappears (making only one brief reappearance, to direct K. to the courtroom), he does have a lingering effect. For in the opening minutes he provides K. with an unlikely role model, a way of persistently asking questions, no matter how oblique, designed to ferret out key bits of evidence, a process that when followed by K. may help him solve his own case. Joseph K. becomes a detective in intent — chasing down leads, however unlikely, and questioning persons of interest, no matter how remote, throughout the rest of the film, until death stops him.
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How do the Chief Inspector and his two Assistant Inspectors conduct their inquiry?
What the Inspectors do, what passes for their forensic technique, is simply to assume that K. is guilty of whatever may pop into their heads, responding to stray things they happen to see or hear in his lodgings. Though topically unfocussed, the interrogation does seem to be largely about personal matters. For example, the Chief Inspector makes much of the fact that when he opens the absent Miss Burstner’s permanently locked adjoining door, to enter K.’s room, the half-asleep K. responds by mumbling her name. The Inspector states, almost as fact, “Miss Burstner frequently comes through that door during the night?” and ignores K.’s reply, “No, no, never, never.”
Welles makes Miss Burstner a far more piquant character than Kafka wrote, not only by casting the glamorous Jeanne Moreau, but by changing her job from a humdrum typist to an exotic cabaret dancer working the midnight “supper show” (as Perkins’s line has it). The Inspectors will therefore commandeer anything they spot on the premises to support their initial suspicions aroused by his mention of Miss Burstner. Notably, when an Assistant Inspector looks at K.’s record player and asks, “What’s this thing?,” the nervous K. stumbles over his words and misspeaks: “That’s my pornograph . . . my phonograph.” Later, the Chief Inspector reads over his notes and returns to the subject: “What’s this? What’s this ‘pornograph?’” A self-incriminating slip of the tongue? More evidence of impropriety?
Everything K. does or says becomes entangled in this growing web of quasi-sexual innuendo, some of which reaches far outside the orbit of Miss Burstner. For instance, oddly, as K. answers questions he takes off his pajama pants in front of the Inspector and puts on his trousers; the two of them then proceed to the subject of his possibly taking a bath and finishing dressing: “If you’re reluctant to dress in front of me,” the Inspector generously suggests, dress in the bathroom. This incongruous banter about bathing and male nudity may put one in mind of the waspish Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) stepping naked from his bathtub in the midst of being interrogated by homicide detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), and then proceeding to dress, a scene with same-sex overtones surprising to find at that date.
Precisely because the Inspectors’ interrogation has been so freewheeling, K. has learned from them how free he can be in conducting an inquiry of his own.
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And learn from them he does.
In a remarkable scene later in the film, Joseph K. conducts himself the way the detectives had at the opening. That is, arriving for his second visit to the Advocate’s house, he bangs aggressively on the door, then bursts in on the servant Leni (“wearing only her petticoat”) and the client Bloch (in disarray), and proceeds to question them closely, especially Bloch (Akim Tamiroff), about their likely liaison, just as the police had barged in on him in his apartment and questioned him about possible goings-on with Miss Burstner. Except that unlike the police, K. is actually right about what’s happening, and he goes on to find out details of the case. Here’s a sample of his interrogation:
JOSEPH K. (roughly): Who are you?
BLOCH: My name is Bloch.
JOSEPH K.: Are you employed here?
BLOCH: No. I’m only a client. I don’t belong to the house, I’m just here on business.
JOSEPH K.: In your shirtsleeves?
BLOCH: Excuse me please.
JOSEPH K.: What have you been doing . . . making love to Leni?
BLOCH: No! No! No! No!
As we learn in this second scene at the Advocate’s house, the servant/mistress Leni (Romy Schneider) does make a practice of seducing the clients and then telling the Advocate (Welles) all about it in detail later on, for their sordid, joint delectation. By looking for some of the worst behavior he could imagine here, K. finds it, proves it, and gets both Leni and the Advocate to admit to their abuse of clients. An investigative triumph — if only anyone cared. In Kafka’s story, the maltreated clients in the legal system are the most miserable of persons, despite the ironic fact that they have an eminent “advocate.”
Further on in the same scene, K. questions Bloch at length about the nature of the Advocate’s mode of legal representation and how he has handled other cases, including Bloch’s own. Here, too, K.’s interrogation bears fruit, as Bloch reveals details about the self-centered working procedures of the Advocate, beyond humiliating his clients. And in an episode of comic relief, K. and Bloch, having now become improbable buddies, have a good laugh at the Advocate’s many petty foibles, pretensions, and larger corruption, all of which is useful information to K., who is considering whether or not to fire the Advocate, and now sees him, with Bloch’s evidence, as a much-diminished figure: narcissistic, ineffective, and perhaps also dangerous to his clients.
The laughter they share, like a few other moments of quirky humor in the film, gestures, if briefly, to what Jeffrey Adams points out (in “Orson Welles’s The Trial: Film Noir and the Kafkaesque,” 2002): “. . . Kafka’s fiction itself . . . actually tends more toward self-conscious irony and comedic playfulness than the imprecise and often self-important term ‘Kafkaesque’ usually suggests.”
Who Is the Slanderer?
In scenes like these, K.’s task as a detective is to figure out what charges may have been made against him, and by whom. Although he manages to ferret out some information, as at the Advocate’s house, he never does discover the charges or who is accusing him.
But there are a few tiny hints, beginning with the novel’s strangely tenuous opening sentence: “Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.” Whose interests would be advanced by slandering him? Well, perhaps the fact that three employees from the office where he works were brought along by the police to witness the arrest in his apartment might suggest that the “slander” mentioned in that first sentence has something to do with K.’s place of business. (In that first scene, K. asks the Inspectors whether these three office employees are “informers,” but as usual gets no answer.) It’s clear from the chapters in the novel set within K.’s office that the Vice President regards K. as a rival, standing in the way of the VP’s elevation to chief executive. Perhaps he’s the one who slandered K. (In Soderbergh’s Kafka, a character based on the Vice President is played with smirking villainy by Joel Grey.)
Welles changes that character’s title to Deputy Manager (in this essay, I follow the screenplay’s character names and titles) and somewhat reduces his screen time. But what’s left is unnerving. In the one scene left to him, the Deputy Manager insinuates that K. is having an affair with Irmie, K.’s fifteen-year-old cousin, who happens to visit the office that day. About her the Deputy Manager gives K. a bit of career advice, to keep his wayward behavior strictly private — “Don’t spoil things for yourself” — and adds with a leer, “We’ll have to keep an eye on you, old man.” But in departing he finally mutters his gruff disgust: “My God!”
This seems like a pretty obvious lead to pursue: being framed with allegations of sexual impropriety coming from a workplace rival. Film noir mysteries are full of frame-ups of all kinds, such as the one perpetrated on Michael O’Hara (Welles) in The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Why isn’t K. able to figure out who is framing him? Would that be too great a challenge to authority to be mounted by a character whose own guilt is already assumed?
Or is this The-Boss-Did-It theory of the case just another red herring? For in the film, the novel’s opening sentence about being slandered “without having done anything wrong” never appears. Nor, of course, does K. himself know of the sentence’s existence in the novel about him. Moreover, the phrasing “must have slandered” suggests a mere deductive inference, not a demonstrable fact of innocence. The novel’s narrator is not of the omniscient variety, does not really know whether K. was slandered or not, and therefore, like K., is also something of a failed detective, unable to get at the truth of the case.
Pursuing Crazed Clerks
Speaking of “without having done anything wrong,” James McBride draws a comparison between Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, concerning their relative suitability to film The Trial (Orson Welles, 1972, p.144): “The Wrong Man [1956], admirable ‘rough draft’ for North by Northwest [1959] drawn from an actual incident of an arrest similar to that in The Trial, lacks the giddy humor of Hitchcock’s later film but could serve as a step-by-step illustration of how to film the nightmarish aspect of Kafka’s world.”
North by Northwest makes for a suggestive parallel, with its flummoxed hero pursued by Soviet thugs, its manic humor perhaps akin to the way that Kafka is known to have chuckled from time to time in reading his manuscripts to his friends. The Wrong Man, though, for all its grim power in rendering the “step-by-step” realistic details of the Law and Order process, does not quite comport with the situation of The Trial, in which the steps as well as the charges are unseen and unknown. The Wrong Man is more a “factual” than a “philosophical” mystery, since in the end “the right man” is found.
Still, the thread of Welles/Hitchcock is worth pulling at some more. The Inspectors’ presumption of K.’s guilt is not without backstory, considering Anthony Perkins’s famous prior role. As James Naremore wryly notes in comparing Welles and Hitchcock (in his Foreword to Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts, 2018, p.vii):
. . . they have interesting things in common: the burning “R” at the end of Rebecca and the burning “Rosebud” at the end of Citizen Kane; the madmen at the family dinner tables in Shadow of a Doubt and The Stranger; the crazed clerks who rent motel rooms to Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil and Psycho.
The last two movies mentioned feature detectives: Welles himself in Touch of Evil, Martin Balsam in Psycho. Janet Leigh, the endangered motel-room renter the two films have in common, of course plays Charlton Heston’s kidnapped bride in Evil and the shower-scene victim in Psycho.
And yet the most original character creation in Touch of Evil, aside from Welles’s own role as Hank Quinlan, is Dennis Weaver as the frantic “night man” at the motel, a performance largely worked out by director and actor in a series of inspired improvisations. And unknowingly, the crazed night man paved the way for Anthony Perkins’s role in Pscyho, made two years later. In turn, Norman Bates became heavy baggage for the rest of Perkins’s career, as he sought to escape the long shadow cast by the mild-mannered Norman and his overly protective “mother.”
In a film like The Trial, driven by the question “Is he guilty?” (not to mention “Guilty of what?”), the audience is preconditioned to think that Perkins is indeed guilty on the basis of his previous, indelible screen persona. As Welles explicitly stated of his Joseph K. in a Cahiers du cinéma interview in April 1965, “I consider him guilty.”
Perkins received mixed notices for his performance as Joseph K., and Welles himself apologized for this in a Q&A session following a screening of The Trial at the University of Southern California in 1981, saying that, discarding the conventional view of the character as a passive “Mr. Zero,” he had directed Perkins to be “a pusher on his way up the bureaucracy . . . anxious to get ahead in this awful world.” Nonetheless, Perkins is a good fit for the role and executes it well. He’s the right age, callow enough for this young “Organization Man,” a popular corporate stereotype of the era, which he was urged to simulate. At the same time, he’s conventionally good-looking enough, with a disarming manner and a winning smile, to credibly pursue the three great international movie stars in the cast (Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli), and to be pursued, in turn, by the posse of pubescent young girls who haunt the artist Titorelli’s studio like precocious Furies.
Despite Welles’s view of K. as a social-climber, when we watch the film now Perkins doesn’t especially come across as an avid careerist or sharp-elbowed seeker of upward mobility, but rather as a jittery young man who doesn’t understand either himself or his surroundings, but who, with considerable intelligence, tries to figure it all out: in other words, very like the character Kafka wrote. In action, though unwise in his open hostility toward members of the legal system, Perkins as directed by Welles has the push to pursue his investigation, despite the many distractions and obstacles in his path.
Distractions and Discoveries
His leading-man potential notwithstanding, Perkins in The Trial retains an edge of insipient madness in his hesitant speech rhythms, furtive glances, and restless hands. To some viewers, these slightly crazed aspects of his characterization may look like evidence of wrongdoing. To others, however, they ally him with a certain strain of detectives — like the one played by Dana Andrews in Laura: morbid under the best of circumstances, and disturbed by the debauched personal lives of those he must investigate.
To be sure, this edginess, which Perkins communicates so well, is another aspect of the director’s interpretation. As part of the Psycho hangover, Perkins was still sometimes seen as androgynous, a legacy of moments like Hitchcock’s notorious shot of Norman Bates, seen from behind, walking up the mansion’s staircase, his hips swaying, as an anticipation of gender-related revelations to come. Similarly, in The Trial, the very first shot of Perkins, a close-up from above his head, shows his long eyelashes sensuously fluttering as he comes to consciousness. Welles knew that Perkins was gay. He did not, however, attempt to exploit that information, as some have asserted, to undermine K.’s erotically charged encounters with Leni, Hilda, and Miss Burstner. Perkins as K. is clearly intrigued and aroused by each of these women in turn, casually promiscuous in how eagerly he responds to each new opportunity for snogging.
Indeed, it’s a commonplace of the genre that the detective will be distracted from time to time by alluring women he happens to meet in the course of his investigations. Humphrey Bogart’s rainy-day dalliance with Acme Book Store proprietor Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep (1946) makes for a notable example, among many others.
The problem for K. is that at a key point, Leni distracts him from effectively pursuing his case. At a crucial meeting with the Advocate, the first time K. comes to his house, when by chance the all-important Chief Magistrate happens to be in attendance, instead of learning all he can from the lawyers K. is seduced away by Leni, who breaks a piece of glass to attract him to a far room, where extended canoodling takes place. After a long interval, by which time the Chief Magistrate is leaving, the two of them come up for air, but the opportunity to question a key figure has been lost while K. passed the time with a would-be femme fatale. Rendering her more ambiguous, though, Leni does nonetheless advance K.’s investigation by tipping him off to the painter Titorelli, an expert on the legal system. Whether the referral helps or hinders remains to be seen.
When K. follows up on Titorelli, the person of interest Leni names, another distraction and perhaps a discovery follow. From time to time, a film noir detective comes across someone of then-unconventional sexual identity. Think of Bogart encountering Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon (1941), among the very earliest gay male characters depicted in an American film (though studio executives objected strongly to Lorre’s playing him as what in a memo they called a “pansy”). Surprisingly, in The Big Sleep, in a scene in a different shop, selling antiquities as well as rare books, Bogart himself does a pretty tart impersonation of a gay bibliophile. And so in Welles’s The Trial, Joseph K. tracks down the artist Titorelli, court painter to judicial eminences, who is said to be in the know about the secret inner workings of the law. As played by William Chappell, the artist summons the fey stereotypes of the era, with his fussy, solicitous manner and lilting speech, his voice largely or perhaps entirely overdubbed by Welles. In K.’s gossipy same-sex encounter with Titorelli, who is wearing only pajamas, the tiny studio becomes so airless and overheated that K. takes off his suit jacket and very nearly faints, distracting him from his purpose and forestalling further interrogation of this high-value source. As K. struggles to leave the stifling, cage-like studio, the painter says to him, “We’re going to keep in real close touch with each other from now on, aren’t we, Joey boy?,” a not-so-subtle come-on which, surrounded as they are by the prying eyes of numberless young girls, brings something out of Perkins/K. that in his working career he preferred to keep hidden, and drives him in panic from the room.
His desperate, headlong flight from the inferno of the painter’s studio closely resembles in its visual style the terrible pursuit of Harry Lime (Welles) by the military police through the sewers of postwar Vienna in The Third Man (1949). Lime runs away from capture on known, factual charges of selling fatally diluted penicillin to hospitals, while K. seems to run away from vague but upsetting knowledge of himself.
A Tale of Two Cities
Here and elsewhere, K. is frequently lost in the metropolis, seeming not to know his way around in his hometown. In this he reflects Welles’s unusual spin on the film noir trope of the city as a place of lurking evil.
In The Lady from Shanghai, the character Michael O’Hara calls a city “a bright, guilty place.” The urban landscape is the natural habitat of film noir, as we know from the San Francisco of Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), the Los Angeles of Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), and the New York of Anthony Mann’s Side Street (1950), all three featuring extensive location shooting.
To these must of course be added the occupied Berlin of Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948) and the postwar Vienna of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). I’d like to suggest that the city of Vienna, divided in the immediate aftermath of World War II into Allied versus Soviet zones, as well as the city of Berlin, which remained divided until 1989, serve as guides to how Welles created his own city in The Trial — a city that comes to embody K.’s predicament.
Kafka’s novel takes place in a deliberately unidentified city, never named as the author’s native Prague. Beyond its lack of a name, almost everything pertinent about the physical character of the city, even which neighborhoods or buildings are adjacent to which, or how main streets connect to each other, is withheld as part of a general disorientation strategy, denying normal contextual information and keeping K. and the reader at a constant disadvantage.
The film’s city, also unnamed, is an invention. Unable to shoot in Prague, in Communist Czechoslovakia, where Kafka’s works were then banned, Welles devised a fictional city of his own creation, pieced together from shooting locations he developed in Paris and Zagreb, and to a lesser extent in Rome and Milan. One of the film’s major changes to Kafka was to turn the nameless, geographically vague city of the novel into a striking character in its own right, complicating K.’s task by providing an overwhelming superabundance of urban visual clues, just the opposite of Kafka’s withholding of geographical data. Here, architecture becomes one of K.’s active adversaries.
Welles was blunt about his reasons for shooting in what was then Yugoslavia. He said that “the hideous blockhouse, soul-destroying buildings were somehow typical of modern Iron Curtain architecture” (quoted in Frank Brady, Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles, 1989, p.529).
Filming in 1962, in the midst of the Cold War, with Eastern and Western Europe divided by the Iron Curtain, he introduced into The Trial’s municipality an inner division, expressed in terms of different architectural styles, as sharp as that between East and West Berlin, which had recently been divided by the construction of the Berlin Wall, in 1961. In the divided city created by the director, it seems that its Paris side stands within what might for lack of a better term be called the “Western zone,” while within the “Eastern zone” lies its Zagreb side, the capital of what was then officially called the Socialist Republic of Croatia.
Specifically, Welles drew on, for the “Western” side, the faded beaux-arts splendor of the dilapidated Gare d’Orsay in Paris, for many court-related scenes, as well as the exterior of the imposing Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome, their grandiose style associated with the last vestiges of the venerable old system of law. Welles said in an interview that in discovering the Gare d’Orsay he found “the law court offices, the corridors — a kind of Jules Verne modernism that seems to me quite in the taste of Kafka” (quoted in Matthew Asprey Gear, At the End of the Street in Shadow: Orson Welles and the City, 2016, p.236).
For the “Eastern” side, he drew on the monstrous new wasteland of monolithic “Zagreb modern” apartment blocks and official buildings. These notably include the airplane-hangar-size exposition hall in the Zagreb Trade Fair (at 15 Dubrovnik Avenue, according to IMDb), where office scenes featuring hundreds of desks and typewriters were shot; the intimidating mass of a well-known Zagreb modern housing complex (240 Grada Vukovara Street), where K. lives; and the People’s Open University (68 Grada Vukovara Street).
The contradiction between the flamboyant beaux-arts West and the drably geometric East is effectively conveyed by K.’s astonishing walk with his cousin through an auteur-created city of disorienting contrasts. K. descends the splendid inner courtyard stairways of the Corte di Cassazione (the Italian supreme court), then heads out through the opulent Tiber-side portals of the surrounding Palazzo di Giustizia, where he meets his cousin Irmie. From there, the two enter a strange, new city of starkly modernist forms, among them unforgivingly blank industrial buildings and a state-sponsored educational compound. K. leaves Irmie in front of his boxy office building, ultimately returning to his monolithic Zagreb apartment block. In this walking tour, the divided city becomes a model of the Cold War.
K. will again walk through the city upon leaving the cathedral, when two nameless police officers march him off to his execution. They pass along their route the huge, cloth-shrouded statue that features in another key scene as well, which I will return to shortly.
The Ending
K. dies while investigating who is responsible for the nefarious, unseen doings that ultimately result in his death. In this he’s rather like Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) in Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1949), who early in the film learns that he has been fatally poisoned, spends the rest of the running time trying to find his killer, and then dies. More recently, in the neo-noir Angel Heart (1987), the private eye Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is hired to find a missing, shell-shocked veteran, who as a result of war injuries suffered amnesia and underwent facial reconstruction; in the end (spoiler alert), it turns out that the man the investigator is looking for is — himself.
The biggest change Welles made to the novel was his radical transformation of K.’s death, turning it from the abject capitulation in the original text to an act of defiance. The film’s K. has a final moment that reveals to him neither the factual nature of his alleged “crime” nor the philosophically unknowable nature of “The Law,” but rather his singular identity as a resistor, however feeble, to the powers that be.
To see something closer to what Kafka had originally written, look at this reasonably faithful version of the novel’s ending in a film of The Trial made by David Jones in 1993. Kafka’s scene of the knife murder of the victim on a sacrificial rock is graphically and accurately shown, ending with K.’s dying words: “Like a dog.”
Here is the novel’s final scene as rewritten and shot by Welles. Anthony Perkins as K. fights back and manages to resist his degradation.
In the Q&A session following a screening of The Trial in 1981 at USC, Welles explained why he made this crucial change. After the Holocaust he could not bear to film Kafka’s submissive acceptance of unjust death because, he said, “it stank of the old Prague ghetto.”
Rather than passively accept being executed with a knife, in the Welles version K. shows defiance. As a result, the murderers give up on the knife and instead throw a fasce (or bound bundle) of sticks of dynamite down to him at the bottom of the quarry. He seems to throw it back up at them, and in the ensuing series of explosions, we never know where it went off or who was blown up.
Significantly, the director chose as the final image of the action a freezeframe of a mushroom cloud, and over it he read out the credits. As the published screenplay (Simon & Schuster, 1970) says of the final image of the film proper, after the explosions: “Dissolve to still shot of another column of smoke, vaguely mushroom-shaped.” That this scene of bomb exchange intentionally resembles an East/West exchange of nuclear weapons can be inferred from the fact that Welles is known to have been at work editing The Trial from September through mid-December 1962, encompassing the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16–28, 1962), as people around the world held their breath while President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev faced off.
From the standpoint of 1962, the year of its making, the film perhaps casts a cloud of doubt over the paradoxical national defense policy of “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, and the leaders of the Cold War era, for imagining that the balance of terror between the nuclear weapons on opposing sides of the Iron Curtain was the best assurance against their use.
Note in passing that such references to a possible nuclear holocaust are well within the range of film noir detective stories. The detonation of the mysterious package at the end of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), based on Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novel, comes immediately to mind. (Advertising posters for the film proclaimed it “Mickey Spillane’s Latest H-Bomb!”)
But in the case of The Trial, there are other stakes as well.
Witness
We may close by returning to Peter Gordon’s persuasive analysis of how the detective genre affects The Trial (“Kafka’s Inverse Theology,” in Kafka’s “The Trial”: Philosophical Perspectives, 2018, pp.36–37):
For Adorno, The Trial reinforces a modern sense of “universal suspicion” that Kafka, he claims, may have borrowed from the popular genre of detective fiction. . . . The paradigmatic event in a detective story is the discovery of a corpse, which becomes the focal point of an unfolding inquiry. This is the structure of a secularized theodicy, which in Kafka’s tale works backward from the mystery of an accusation to the production of a corpse. To be sure, the inversion borrows its mood of generalized paranoia from the popular genre: a detective, after all, must suspect nearly everyone and anyone, since otherwise there would be no mystery. But this very mood derives its power from a theological worldview in which the all-seeing eye of an unseen God spreads the possibility of guilt across all of society.
The line leading up to “spreads the possibility of guilt across all of society” needs to be read closely. For Welles seems, at least, to say largely the same thing about his own version of Joseph K., that he “belongs to a guilty society” (Cahiers du cinéma, April 1965):
He’s . . . a little bureaucrat. I consider him guilty. . . . He belongs to something which represents evil and which is part of him at the same time. He is not guilty of what he’s accused of, but he’s guilty all the same: he belongs to a guilty society, he collaborates with it.
The problem with this point, however, is that, as Gordon goes on to argue, Kafka did not take a “theological worldview” at all, and voided the existence of any such “unseen God” to whom to appeal for justice and redress. Indeed, Kafka alluded to the annulled idea of divinity only to demonstrate by its utterly silent absence just how truly awful “this awful world” really is.
Yet Welles, as a public figure, and working half a century later, sought, to the consternation of some critics, to make shared guilt for the Holocaust part of the updated context of his Trial film, and thus arrived at plot outcomes different from Kafka’s. And so in addition to changing the culminating execution, the director added a surreal scene of K., on his way to the court’s Preliminary Interrogation, passing through a group of wretched detainees wearing numbers, like prisoners in a concentration camp.
The prisoners K. witnessed sat beneath the huge, mysteriously shrouded statue that, later on, will preside as well over his march to his execution. Although its arms are upraised in the traditional posture of blessing, its apparently benevolent gesture toward the little humans below is obscured by the figure’s being hidden from our direct gaze, under a wind-blown cloth that also covers the statue’s own eyes. Despite being disregarded by everyone in the film, does its enigmatic presence in some mute way bear witness to the great injustices — done to K. and to the prisoners — that take place before it?
In the hushed, ceremonial way that Welles staged and lit the two scenes at the statue, its presence may suggest to certain viewers at least some vestigial possibility of a “theological worldview,” showing through a monumental act of witness that “an unseen God” above sees these events, too, and reveals the guilt of “all of society” — for letting genocidal oppression arise within a supposedly civilized state.
For the director, the solution to the mystery of Joseph K. is thus to some extent a factual one: the guilty party turns out to be a totalitarian regime that murders its citizens at will. For the novelist, however, the philosophical mystery of human despair before “The Law” remains unresolved, and no criminal can be found.
(October 2019)