Plot
Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is awakened in his apartment one morning by two police officers who inform him that he is under open arrest. The officers decline to identify the crime that Josef K. is being charged with, nor do they take him into custody. When the officers leave, Josef K. converses with his landlady, Mrs. Grubach (Madeleine Robinson), and his neighbor, Miss Burstner (Jeanne Moreau), about what transpired. He later goes to his office, where he is reprimanded by his superior for allegedly having improper relations with his female teenage cousin. That evening, Josef K. goes to the opera, but is taken from the theater by a police inspector (Arnoldo Foà) and is brought to a courtroom, where his attempts to confront the peculiar nature of his case are in vain. He later returns to his office and discovers the two police officers who first visited him are being whipped in a small room. Josef K.’s uncle Max recommends that he consult with Hastler (Orson Welles), a law advocate. After brief encounters with the wife of a courtroom guard (Elsa Martinelli) and a room full of condemned men waiting for trial, Josef K. has an interview with Hastler, which proves unsatisfactory. Hastler’s mistress (Romy Schneider) suggests that Josef K. seek out the advice of the artist Titorelli (William Chappell), but this is also not helpful. Seeking refuge in a cathedral, Josef K. learns from a priest (Michael Lonsdale) that he has been condemned to death. Hastler abruptly appears at the cathedral to confirm the priest’s information. On the evening before his thirty-first birthday, Josef K. is apprehended by two executioners and is brought to a quarry, where he is forced to remove some of his clothing. The executioners give the condemned man a knife, but he refuses to commit suicide. The executioners leave Josef K. in a quarry pit and throw dynamite at him. Josef K. laughs at his executioners and picks the dynamite up. Then from a distance there is an explosion and the smoke from the dynamite billows into the air.
Read more about this topic: The Trial (1962 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)