Word: orson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Trial. Orson Welles is a cinema genius whose flops are more fascinating than the hits of lesser men, and in this eerie piece of esoterica, an adaptation of Franz Kafka's parable of the Anxious Age, he has produced the most fascinating failure of his career, a madhouse matinee that...
Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Trevor Howard trying to save the African elephant in The Roots of Heaven, with Errol Flynn, Orson Welles and Eddie Albert...
...Orson Welles, who wrote and directed the first film version of Kafka's masterpiece, has wisely declined to decide. He accepts every possible interpretation as a limb of the author's allegorical monster, as a circle of the Hell in whose image he imagined man is made. Into this pit, his cameras rolling like the eyes of Lucifer, Welles plunges with tartarean energy; and if he cannot quite get to the bottom of it all he nevertheless comes up with a film of infernal brilliance, perhaps the most exciting picture he has made since The Magnificent Ambersons...
...arrives-but what sort of court is this? It sits in a dingy old loft. Its "lawbooks" are filled with pornographic pictures. The examining magistrate gets K.'s case all mixed up with the case of a house painter. To conduct his defense, K. retains an advocate (Orson Welles). But while the old earwig is mumbling about legal problems, K. sneaks off with his chambermaid (Romy Schneider), a sexy witch with webbed fingers who takes him for a tumble in a pile of old legal papers...
...Welles of several years ago would surely have run wild in such a setting. In The Trial, setting and camera steadily subserve the subject. So do the actors-even Orson. As the advocate he has a small part and the grace to play it small . . . as small, that is to say, as a man his size can play anything. As the director he coaxes some entrancing episodes from Romy Schneider and a good low bit from Jeanne Moreau. And he gets more out of Tony Perkins than there is in him. This resolutely cute young man, the sweater-boy wonder...