Trial and Error

...If Kafka, the artist, errs, it is because he himself does not know the answers (which, in art, is as likely to be a virtue...

...The gravest of these is that Kafka's work has to be perceived on at least three levels— psychological, political, religious— whereas Welles, with typical oversimplification, makes it purely political...

...What characterizes Welles' work is the continual subordination or rejection of the idea for the sake of the trick...

...Dread irony is everywhere...

...Again, there is no crude and obvious trickery in the novel...

...For once you have implied that the whole thing is one big nightmare, anything goes...

...If the lawyer's quarters in the novel are lit by candles—with disquieting implications of stinginess, backwardness or a guilty fear of light—Welles seizes on this as an excuse for plastering every inch of the set with candles: enough candles to outfit all the churches in Spain...

...Another new film, the Italian Mondo Cane ("A Bestial World"), on the other hand, successfully reveals whatever is horrifying about human nature...

...Now one of the few definable traits of a genius is that, no matter how much he loves himself, he loves something beyond himself more...

...But not far away, on Bikini, the bomb has crazed the animal world: Birds lead ghastly underground lives, fish climb trees, and sea turtles, their sense of orientation destroyed, painfully die deep inland...

...The indictment of our inconsistency, vanity, meanness and stupidity is made fiercely effective by consummate photography and economically mordant narration...

...Here are a few examples: The office in which Kafka's K. works is a perfectly everyday office, which makes it a more likely scene of rivalries, anxieties, humiliations and failure than the office in the film, where identical desks over which bend identical ciphers stretch literally as far as the eye can see...

...There is nothing about the work of Orson Welles to convince us that he has ever felt humility or love anywhere except in front of a mirror...

...Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Moby Dick, Damon's Death—all these were approached by Welles as though they were no different from something by Jules Verne or Eric Ambler, and, by the time Welles got through with them, they weren't...

...This, to be sure, may be understandable coming from someone who is obviously strong on tricks and weak on ideas...

...But, let it be said once more, tout comprendre is not tout pardonner...

...or, perhaps, misguided optimism to the very last), religious significance (we are the human sacrifice on the altar of an inscrutable divinity), and political meaning (the state, or society, disposes of us obscurely, brutally, efficiently...

...The particular brilliance, however, is in the film's structure: It progresses from madness to complementary madness, and the seeming contrasts between aborigines and ourselves turn out to be parallels...

...He picks it up, makes a speech full of bravado and platitudes, and hurls, or almost hurls, the firecracker back at his tormentors, whereupon (I swear I'm not making this up) an atom bomb explodes...

...Kafka ends his novel with K. being butchered with a knife even as in a distant window someone waves at him...

...There is something to be said for the sets and locations and for some of the visual effects, however reductive they are of Kafka's purpose, and for Arnoldo Foa's police inspector and Akim Tamiroff's Bloch...

...There are so many things wrong with The Trial that I shall have to limit myself to a few principal objections...

...The sentimental note in Kane, the quest for Rosebud, is much more of a useful narrative device than a convincing expression of fellow feeling...

...Welles has degraded the ending to an absurd piece of didacticism...

...But Welles the actor is unsubtle as the defense attorney...

...The audience is only too happy to shrug off the whole thing as mere phantasmagoria...

...Unfortunately, all urgency goes, too...

...The effect achieved would suit the works of expressionists like Kaiser and Toller...

...In Macao, a rich man's funeral entails burning large quantities of his money...

...But if Welles' solipsism vitiates his bid for genius, his colossal lack of taste tends to mar even his talent...

...In his attempts at great works, however—and he is fatally drawn to them—Welles' tastelessness becomes a nagging pain in the discriminating spectator's stomach...

...Under the guise of a plain documentary, a reportage of quaint folkways around the world, it manages to be the most devastating travelogue in 236 years—or since the appearance of Gulliver's Travels...

...The closing sequence of The Lady from Shanghai, in which two characters try to shoot each other in a maze of mirrors and cannot tell the person from his reflection is emblematic of Welles' work (with the exception of Citizen Kane and perhaps The Magnificent Ambersons): Always perceiving reality distorted by a cabal of mirrors, Welles repeatedly misses the mark...

...Even if it did not go at Kafka's expense, this would be quite bad enough...

...Welles the director cannot get a decent performance from even as gifted an actress as Jeanne Moreau...

...Thus a sequence in a Pasadena pet cemetery where Pharaonic funeral pomp and orgies of grief accompany the demise of Fido is followed by a scene in a Formosan restaurant where terrified caged puppies, awaiting the same fate, watch their fellows being devoured by lip-smacking gastronomes of Taipei...

...This, no doubt, is largely owing to Welles' determination to simplify matters, even to the point of stating in the narration, right at the beginning, that The Trial has the illogic of dreams, and underlining this by focusing on K.'s sleeping face...

...This has psychological value (failure—death—in the proximity of possible help...

...tersely the narrator comments: "The heirs watch the solemn ceremony in tears...

...but expressionism was concerned with universal symbols and social issues, whereas Kafka's primary concern was with burrowing into the individual psyche...

...The only trait shared by them is irony, but where Kafka's irony hovers in disturbing suspension over ego and universe, Welles' crashes down so heavily on a specific, and sometimes questionable, target that it tends to annihilate itself along with its object...

...In the film, K.—played by Tony Perkins as Jack Armstrong Behind the Iron Curtain—is dumped into a pit by his cowardly executioners who do not dare stab him but toss in after him what looks like a firecracker...

...Or, in an idiotic mass ceremony, hordes of Australian Girl Life Savers "rescue" male victims of a mock drowning by applying mouth-to-mouth respiration — redundantly bringing life to the living amidst foolish sexual games...

...Not since Brecht's Seven Deadly Sins has there been such a Philippic against both extremes and such skeptical doubt of any via media...

...if Welles, the non-artist, errs, it is because he knows all the answers, and they strike us as wrong...

...It documents wittily, ruthlessly and beautifully man's inhumanity to men, animals, nature, and himself...

...No less improper is the turning of the protagonist K. into someone who is manifestly free of guilt and never doubts his blamelessness...

...True, when he adapts or concocts entertainments such as Journey into Fear, The Lady from Shanghai or Touch of Evil, or when he broadcasts an invasion from Mars, there is little or nothing for his proliferating showmanship to smother, but in such cases the audience cannot be quite sure that a really good three-ring circus wouldn't be closer to art...

...and Welles the scenarist goes in for wit like "What's this pornograph...

...Mondo Cane does simply and efficaciously what the Theater of the Absurd accomplishes usually only with much huffing and puffing...

...The effect is baroque and bizarre —striking but meaningless...

...And what middle road is there...

...Between two scenes in which the natives of New Guinea are at their Stone Age best, we see them piously embracing Christian ritual...

...Yet Kafka's impact derives precisely from the fact that everything is nearly ordinary, nearly classifiable, nearly our own experience, so that we, like the hero, are perpetually jumping for solutions dangled just above us, and cannot settle into easy disbelief or, what is worse, easy belief in some obvious answer...

...The sea turtle baking to death thinks it is in the water and dies in a fearful parody of swimming...

...The success of Citizen Kane, Welles' only unassailable achievement, stems in large part from the fact that his protagonist elicits mingled contempt and envy, feelings which Welles is perfectly equipped to dispense...

...as W. H. Auden points out in The Dyer's Hand, "If the K. of The Trial were innocent, he would cease to be K. and become nameless . . ." Concomitantly, Kafka's world is irrational, pettifogging, dilatory, unsympathetic, ugly and, worst of all, incomprehensible...

...For his newest film, Welles has picked Kafka's The Trial, and if ever two temperaments were polar opposites, they are the delicately devious Kafka, whose meanings seem one great iridescent elusiveness, and the assertive Welles, who loves the stridently grandiose, the unmistakable effect...

...If one old woman among the grim crones toiling away to beautify themselves at Vic Tanny's seems happy, it is only because a rubber belt massaging her behind elicits a garishly sexual smile in front...

...To quote Auden's essay on Kafka again, "He [who] tries to interpret a parable . . . will only reveal himself...

...about a phonograph), profundities such as "Even the saints have temptations," felicities such as "I'm just sick with guilt," and many a bit of aphoristic satire like "A computer—one of those electronic gimmicks that give you the answer to everything you see...

...Welles goes this one better and reveals himself with horrifying success without half trying to interpret the parable...

...the logic of time and space is not deliberately jumbled...

...The film, however, is continually tampering with sequential and topographical consistency...

...But it is not, like the world in the film, grossly vicious and, in its lack of shading, dull...