Metrograph

Welles’s fever dream adaptation of Franz Kafka’s posthumously published 1925 novel of the same name opens with the director narrating the author’s parable “Before the Law” over pinscreen scenes created by artists Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, then proceeds to maintain the established air of ravishing, sinister strangeness for nearly two hours, with Anthony Perkins’s writhing, beleaguered bureaucrat Josef K. persecuted and pursued through menacingly looming locales in an Expressionistic cityscape stitched together from a melange of locations in Dubrovnik, Milan, Rome, and Paris’s then-abandoned Gare d’Orsay. Adding to his distress are a trio of sexually aggressive women, played by Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, and Schneider, superb in her first English-language role as the hot-to-trot nurse/secretary attending to K.’s legal representative, the Advocate, played by Welles himself. One of the great black-and-white films of the 1960s, and one of the great films, full stop.

Distributor: Rialto Pictures