Orson Welles, the greatest film director of all time, only made one perfect film in his life time, the much lauded Citizen Kane. The remainder of his projects demonstrate flawed works of genius. All displaying Welles’s enormous level of visual panache but all misrepresented by outside input. The most extreme example of this being the ending placed onto the end of Welles’s sophomore picture, The Magnificent Ambersons, that was not even directed by Welles himself. The filming of Kafka’s opus was a typically turbulent one for the auteur and the film has switched legal ownership time and time again, a definitive version was literally unobtainable in the 20th century. Nevertheless it is an excellent film, critically overlooked by contemporaries for being a flawed adaptation and for the inscrutability of the nightmarish and surrealist atmosphere conjured up by the master dramatist Welles.

The film vaguely touches upon the brutal and relentless way in which the law as a social institution reaches out and enmeshes men in its complex and calculating clutches until it crushes them to death, but above all the film is a visual achievement. Welles’ exuberant use of camera placement, movement and inventive lighting are breathtaking. The narrative, though not wholly coherent and satisfactory, is carried well by a neurotic and uneasy performance by Anthony Perkins as K, but it really is all about the visual. The modern and the baroque combine with gorgeous luminous black and white photography to create Welles’ most long lasting ocular impression.

Every frame makes a fantastic still, the movie as a whole is a disturbing trip that gets weirder and more inscrutable as Perkins journey’s further into his ‘so called trial’ and the scene near the end of the film where Josef K runs desperately down a corridor, blinded by the light breaking through the cracked wooden walls is dizzily brilliant.

While not exactly Kafka, every inch of this is most certainly Welles.