Anthony Perkins realizes the paranoia of Joseph K, charged with an unnamed crime by uncooperative detectives and pursued by victims, executioners, and young girls through a nightmarish European city which is darker than the blackest things in horror of film noir. The terrifying,thought provoking, dreamily real picture could only have been brought to us by Orson Welles. He comes to us not only as a director, but again as an actor. Welles plays a bedridden lawyer in a cavernous house and enters in the cloud of smoke from a cigar. Romy Shneider shines as his nursemaid who seduces the lawyers clients like K and Block(Akim Tamiroff). Welles updated Kafka's THE TRIAL to the age after the holocaust and the atomic bomb. This is aided by the locations Welles was forced to shoot in after funding was cut. Edmund Richard masterfully moves his camera through the ruined interiors of a decaying industrial Europe. K's dillema is hightened by the cavernous abandoned railroad station. The picture is genius from the pinscreen opening to the spellbinding climax. Fans of THE THIRD MAN should appreciate the final scenes. Welles's best and therefore the best there is.
