The Trial

Orson Welles considered The Trial (1962) the best film he ever made, and his adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel of bureaucratic nightmare is one of his most visually overwhelming works. Made in European exile on a patchwork budget, it found Welles improvising grandeur out of limitation, most famously by shooting in the cavernous, abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris.

Anthony Perkins, fresh from Psycho, plays Josef K., the man arrested for an unspecified crime, with Welles himself as the imperious Advocate and Romy Schneider and Jeanne Moreau among the women who drift through the labyrinth. Welles renders Kafka's world through vast, distorting spaces, oppressive low angles and a relentless forward momentum. His totalitarian dreamscape of the individual crushed by faceless systems looks timeless, and pointedly modern too.

It divided critics on release, and some found it overwrought, but it has grown in stature as one of the great literary adaptations and a high point of Welles's restless late period. Its architecture of paranoia fed directly into Brazil and a host of later dystopian films about the individual lost in the machine. In The Trial, Welles wrestles Kafka onto the screen with all the audacity at his command, and the result is bold, claustrophobic and formally astonishing. Restored prints have since let new audiences find it, and its standing among Welles's admirers has risen sharply. Anyone who comes to it after Brazil will recognise where much of that film's dread was first built.