The latest round of online store additions is ready to go up. Today’s slate consists of Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite,” Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy,” and “The Trial” by Orson Welles.
Speaking of “The Trial,” Orson Welles said, “I’ve had recurring nightmares of guilt all my life. It’s the most autobiographical movie I’ve ever made, the only one that’s really close to me.” Based on the novel by Franz Kafka, “The Trial” is the story of a young man named Josef K (Anthony Perkins) who is awoken one day by investigators that tell him he’s under arrest, yet they either can’t or won’t state what the charge is or who is accusing him. Though it might be tempting to draw a parallel between Josef’s struggle against bureaucracy and Welles’s battles for creative freedom, there’s one key distinction: while the reason for his persecution confounds Josef, Welles fully understood the reasons why those who undermined his work did what they did. In an interview with a show called “Tempo” that appears as an extra on the Blu-ray, Welles says of his ouster at RKO: “If I sound bitter about it it’s only because it’s cost me an awful lot of work, but it was a perfectly understandable thing for them to do, they weren’t being particularly villains. That’s the normal way of things happening on any big takeover in goverment or a studio or a company. It’s a classic story.”