The Trial

The Trial (Le Procès, 1962) is Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel, free to watch online on iFILM. One morning, clerk Josef K. is arrested in his own bed and never told what he has done.

There is a charge but no crime anyone will name — not the investigators, not the lawyer, not K. himself. Anthony Perkins, fresh off playing Norman Bates in Psycho, is the man trying to prove his innocence inside a machine that treats guilt as the starting point and keeps its rules hidden. Around him drift strange women and officials played by Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Elsa Martinelli, while Welles casts himself as the sinister advocate.

Welles shot much of it in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris — empty halls, endless corridors, towers of paper files that turn bureaucracy into a physical nightmare. He called it the best film he ever made, ahead of Citizen Kane. This is heavy, claustrophobic cinema, not background viewing: a study of absurd power and one man's helplessness before it, and it still cuts as deep as it did sixty years ago. Stream The Trial (1962) online on iFILM.