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Most critics agree that the classical period of film noir began in 1941 with John Huston's Maltese Falcon and ended in 1958 with Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. In an influential essay of 1972 entitled "Notes on Film Noir" screenwriter/director Paul Schrader calls Touch of Evil "film noir's epitaph" (1998, 61).As Schrader explains, by the mid-fifties the allure of film noir had begun to fade. Its worldview was gradually being displaced by a new type of crime drama which moved criminal activity from the mean streets of the dark metropolis to a lighter, more suburban locale, where it was easier to veil the socially critical subtexts of film noir in the "ludicrous affirmations of the American way of life" called for by the McCarthy era (61). Schrader also cites television as a primary cause for film noir's waning popularity. With its technical emphasis on high-key lighting and color cinematography, the new medium turned viewers away from the black-and-white "mystery lighting" that distinguishes the visual aesthetic of film noir. The early sixties were crisis years for this visual style, "the last years," writes James Naremore, "in which black and white could be shown in the United States without seeming like a parody or a deliberate allusion to the past" (1998, 190).
In 1962, when the noir style was in decline, Orson Welles agreed to direct a black-and-white adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial which clearly draws on the structural elements of film noir to achieve its effects. Although Welles openly admitted that Kafka's novel was not his first choice for an adaptation, he later stated that he had never been so happy as when he was making The Trial, perhaps because for the first time since Citizen Kane he had almost total control over the production process (Brady 1989, 529). On another equally important level, directing The Trial allowed Welles to recreate the stylistic aura of Citizen Kane and his classic noirs, enabling a narcissistic return to the glory days when he had helped create a style that would become the signature of his auteur identity. Though it still stands as one of the most compelling cinematic adaptations of Kafka, Welles's The Trial would probably not have succeeded so well in capturing the Kafkaesque if it...