The Trial

The Trial directed by Orson Welles and staring Anthony Perkins.

Despite what I’m going to say about this movie, I really like this poster design.  

I like older movies, normally because the story lines are focused, they actually have characters, and, since they don’t rely on special effects as heavily as movies do now-a-days, there’s just a certain way they’re made that makes them feel more genuine, instead of a mass produced Hollywood movie.  They don’t feel like product as most movies do now-a-days.  Sadly, this is not one of the better older movies I’ve seen.  Given that Welles had directed it, I was expecting a lot more, after all he did make two really great movies: Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.  Two of the best movies ever made.  Sadly, just about every movie he made after these two just doesn’t match up the brilliance of them, Touch of Evil is the closest movie Welles came to matching those two movies.  So yah, I had some high expectations.

The directing for this movie was simply amazing, but the directing couldn’t hide the main problem, and that was lack of a centralized storyline.  It was like this movie was directed by Terrence Mallick only there was an absence of constant narration.  There just wasn’t anyone for me to care for in this movie or care about anything that was happening at all as the plodded on.   I use that word plod because that’s what this movie did, it plodded with a slowness I associate with arty movies.  Essentially, that’s what this movie is, it’s just an arty movie through and through, and I really hate arty movies, their pretentiousness nauseates me as they rely way to heavy on symbols, analogies, and interpretation versus actual storytelling.  Actual storytelling was clearly present in Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil, so I was expecting a lot more Welles than he delivered with this movie.  All and all it was one boring movie that would have got no recognition without Welles’ involvement.