Prodigal Revived

When he stood, everyone stood. When he sat, cross-legged like a giant Buddha on the floor, all eyes in the luxurious Paris apartment turned toward him. Through the whole long evening, he laughed, talked, puffed on a cigar, listened to the gypsy singers, and downed endless jiggers of vodka. At 3 in the morning, when two or three couples started for the door, he bellowed: "You're not leaving already, my friends. The night is young. Play, gypsies; play, play, play!" The guests stayed, the gypsies played. Once again, and at long last, Orson Welles was front and center.

Welles was basking in the afterglow and acclaim that attended the completion of the Welles-directed, Welles-scripted version of Kafka's The Trial, the story of a man victimized by the impersonal hostility of a bureaucratic world he never made. Viewers of the early rushes, including Directors Anatole Litvak and Jules Dassin, say they witnessed the birth of a classic. Twenty-one years after his Citizen Kane won him the title of boy genius and doomed him to a lifetime of trying to hold on to it, Orson Welles seemed to be making a comeback.

Waddling Exile. In between Kane and Kafka, Welles took two wives (Rita Hayworth and Incumbent Paula Mori), gained a couple of hundred pounds, and directed seven pictures. His wildly impressionistic Othello, and Macbeth in Scottish burr, were called moody masterpieces in Europe, but failed miserably in the U.S. Aside from brief bits of acting (most memorably in The Third Man and Compulsion), Welles did little more than perpetuate his public caricature. Smoking sequoia-sized cigars, he waddled like an exiled giant through Europe, looking gloomily for a future and nostalgically at the past.

Interviewed by Paris' Cahiers du Cinema, he talked of giving up the stage and screen forever, "since in a way they've already abandoned me. I've worked too hard for what I've been given in return. I can't spend my life in restaurants and festivals begging funds." He scraped along on occasional television appearances, started (but never finished) four films that he financed himself. Then Producers Michel and Alexander Salkind (a father and son team; Michel produced Greta Garbo's first film outside Sweden, the team an occasional epic in recent years) offered him a walk-on in Taras Bulba. Though he needed the money, Welles indignantly refused, trumpeting, "Are you crazy? I am Taras Bulba." But Welles seized the opportunity to tell the Salkinds of his long-cherished dream of making a movie of The Trial. "Sure we were scared," says Alexander Salkind. "Before we agreed to do it, we set out to find the money, and you can imagine, with Welles' reputation, what that was like. But all our fears have been dissipated."

Baroque Grotesque. For an estimated $1,300,000, the Salkinds gathered an international cast: France's Jeanne Moreau, Germany's Romy Schneider, Greece's Katina Paxinou, Italy's Elsa Martinelli, the U.S.'s Anthony Perkins. They left the rest to Welles.

Welles spent six months on the script, paring it down to what he considered a workable approximation of the novel. Then he scoured Europe for possible locations, settled on Yugoslavia for its "natural sets, which couldn't be 'placed' by most cinema audiences, the faces in crowds with a Kafka look to them, and the hideous blockhouse, soul-destroying buildings, which are somehow typical of modern Iron Curtain architecture." In a mammoth exposition hall just outside Zagreb, Welles set up the 850 office desks, 850 secretaries and 850 clattering typewriters among which Kafka's hero, K, lived out his doom. Moving to Paris for later scenes, Welles picked the old, abandoned Gare d'Orsay (built for the Exposition of 1900, and now destined for demolition), whose baroque grotesqueries might well have been designed by Kafka; into its ruined corridors and dank corners Welles moved his props: the Advocate's gigantic gilt bed, hundreds of dripping candles, decaying tables and books. Wrote Director William Chappell in the London Sunday Times: "Welles discovered Kafka's world, with the genuine texture of pity and terror on its damp and scabrous walls, real claustrophobia in its mournful rooms, and intricacies of shape and perspective on a scale that would have taken months and cost fortunes to build."

No man to yield a role to another actor if he can do it himself, Welles cast himself as the Advocate. But to the Salkinds' pleased astonishment, there were no shocks, no delays, no budget excesses.

In the afterglow of success, Welles briskly reverted to the arrogant ways of old, brushed off reporters, and put on a show of a man of many concerns. He was flying to Rome for two weeks to shoot The Trial's execution scene (nothing in France suited him), then was moving his family to Malaga for the summer. There he will also shoot the prologue and epilogue of his movie, Don Quixote ("I didn't have enough money to finish it before, but now I think I can swing it"), commuting to Paris to cut and edit The Trial, which is due for September release. At 47, the Boy Wonder was a boy again.

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