Welles Considered ‘The Trial’ His Best Film; Your Verdict?

Orson Welles declared “The Trial” (1962) the best film he ever made. It’s safe to say that most of his legion of admirers would disagree, holding out for “Citizen Kane.” But you can understand how Welles could feel this way about his film, which plays Friday through Tuesday at the Nuart (11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A.) in a fully restored version presented on a new 35-millimeter print.

The film (inspired by the Kafka novel of the same name)--as brilliant as it is--is too emotionally arid and intellectually abstract until its grand climactic sequence formost tastes to equal the overall impact of the more accessible “Citizen Kane.” It’s easy to see how Welles, given the often absurd setbacks in his own career, could identify with his hero, Joseph K., superbly portrayed by Anthony Perkins.

At once prim and proper yet boyishly naive and vulnerable, Perkins’ Joseph K. is a mid-level banker in a vast institution in an unnamed but clearly European city. One morning he is rudely awakened at 6 a.m. by two policemen accompanied by three co-workers. He is not told of his charges, advised strongly not to ask, is not taken immediately into custody but is subsequently told that his “interrogation will take place outside normal office hours” so that he may stay on the job. “The logic of this story is the logic of a dream--or of a nightmare,” Welles warns us during the prologue, an illustrated sequence that suggests that when it comes to God and the law, the conscientious man is eternally, hopelessly, trapped in a Catch-22.

Visually, the film is Welles at his most dazzling, with locales in Zagreb, Rome and, most dramatically, Paris’ then-abandoned rail station Gare d’Orsay, eventually recycled as the Musee d’Orsay. “The Trial” is as nightmarish as “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” yet also evokes King Vidor’s silent classic “The Crowd” with its sea of anonymous office workers toiling away at their identical desks. But if Vidor’s hero is Everyman coping with life’s joys and sorrows, Welles’ Joseph K. is not “one of the crowd” but slightly above it and therefore more easily singled out for condemnation for reasons never given.

Welles’ dramatic use of grandiose 19th century locales evokes the oppressiveness of the past while his starkly modern settings evoke a dehumanizing impersonality. Some of his images evoke the Holocaust, but on a political level “The Trial” works best as an allegory of the plight of the individual in the Communist Eastern Bloc, then in the full flowering of its power. But so powerful--and personal--is Welles’ vision that one can see in the plight of Joseph K. the plight of the artist--i.e., Welles--and, beyond that, the plight of the human condition in which life itself remains the eternal mystery, tantalizing and perplexing.

Welles significantly shifts Joseph K.’s temperament from passive in the novel to the active as he gradually realizes that trying to play by rules that are ultimately unknown is futile, and therefore he becomes increasingly defiant in the face of an implacable fate. Along the way he meets the Advocate (Welles), a powerful lawyer grown decadent and indolent, and beautiful women (Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli) who want to seduce him and may actually also want to help him--you suspect Perkins’ uptight Joseph K. is a virgin. By contrast, a shady lady (Jeanne Moreau), Joseph K.’s fellow boarder in a dentist’s widow’s large apartment in a vast housing project, wants no part of him, fleeing once she learns the authorities have been poking around her room as well. Cerebral and highly verbal, “The Trial” is one of Welles’ most challenging fables, ultimately profoundly moving, and one of his most fully realized films. (310) 478-6379.

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Robert Pappas’ “Some Fish Can Fly,” which begins a one-week run Friday at the Grande 4-Plex (Figueroa Street at 3rd Street, downtown L.A.), seems so personal that Pappas must have lived it. At any rate, it is a love story so observant and wise, with such winning actors, that this is one first film that deserves a much bigger showcase.

Told from the point of view of the man, “Some Fish” finds aspiring New York filmmaker Kevin (Kevin Causey) and Nora (Nancy St. Alban), a radiantly beautiful visitor from Cork City, Ireland, instantly and mutually attracted. It is so much love at first sight that soon Nora is accepting Kevin’s proposal of marriage, yet feels she first must return home, assured that her father will pick up the expense of her swift return to the U.S. Thus begins a seesaw transatlantic relationship with neither partner quite able to make the permanent leap to the other partner’s home turf, yet never quite able to fall out of love with each other either. As the film progresses, we realize that there is more than geography separating the two, something perhaps ultimately undefinable, but we also realize they will neither fall out of love with each other nor love another as deeply. Just as you’re beginning to lose patience and feel they ought to start getting their act together, you’re reminded that life is like this--that if this kind of love might not have happened to you, it might well have happened to one of your parents or someone else close to you. It’s all in the timing, Kevin decides, and he is probably right.

If “Some Fish” does not get the exposure it deserves--and it probably won’t, at least not theatrically--it is certainly a splendid calling card for Pappas, and for St. Alban and the pleasant-looking, stocky Causey, who are a most believable couple. The film, furthermore, is as ambitious in its structure, with Kevin vainly attempting to make a film drawn from his ambivalent romance while he has yet to come to terms with its ultimately impossible nature. At the conclusion of “Some Fish Can Fly,” a note in the end credits tells us that this film represents Kevin’s second attempt, which suggests Pappas did, in fact, experience what he expresses with such tenderness. (213) 617-0268.

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When Takeshi Kitano was interviewed by The Times last year, he remarked that his hard-core fans especially admired his first two pictures as a director as well as a tough-guy star, “Violent Cop” (1989) and “Boiling Point” (1990), which play Sunday through Dec. 23 at the New Beverly Cinema (7165 Beverly Blvd.). Both are terrifically stylish, bluntly brutal and nihilistic, especially the first. By the time Kitano, whose acting name is Beat Takeshi, did “Sonatine” (1993) and “Fireworks” (1997), he was still playing gangsters or cops but had become romantic, as well as contemplative, in his roles.

“Violent Cop” more than lives up to its title as Kitano, as a big-city policeman, is never shy about punching, hitting, kicking or slapping a person to make his point; he’s dirtier than Dirty Harry. Now, the corpse of a drug dealer leads not only to a corrupt fellow cop but also to endangering his own emotionally unstable sister. “Violent Cop” is utterly remorseless and so uncompromising the ending actually comes as a surprise.

The title of “Boiling Point” refers to a young gas station attendant whose refusal to kowtow to local Yakuza triggers mayhem while the attendant coolly insists on going about his life, concentrating on developing his batting skills on a local baseball team; by the time the film is over--and the attendant has encountered a helpful if savage disgruntled ex-gangster (Kitano)--the attendant has reached his boiling point. He also has become as adept with a gun as he is with a bat.

Both films are remarkable for their detachment and fluidity, and Kitano has explained that when planning a film he envisions it in its entirety as a sequences of color slides before he begins writing his scripts. In any event, Takeshi Kitano is one of the most exciting directors to emerge in international cinema in this decade. (323) 938-4038.