What was The Trial’s crime? Had it fallen into an abyss between Welles’s and Kafka’s divergent sensibilities? Was Anthony Perkins miscast as Kafka’s persecuted everyman? Was Welles antagonistic to the material? He didn’t do himself any favors by suggesting he’d chosen the book flippantly, from a list of literary works to adapt handed him by producer Alexander Salkind. Yet Welles also regularly called the film his happiest experience. “You know why I defend it,” he told Bogdanovich. “I suppose because it’s my own picture, unspoiled in the cutting or anything else . . . The producers were heroic and got it made, and there isn’t anything I had to compromise.” A doubter might chalk this up to petulance, yet Welles never relented on his regard for the movie. “Say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I ever made,” he told Cahiers du cinéma in 1965.
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