The Castle, a German-Swiss co-production of 1963 directed by Rudolf Noelte, may have had some distribution in Europe, but it received very little exposure in the United States except to be released for television viewing, one presumes on a late show.

Described as an "appropriately vague" film version of the novel in a popular movie reference book, the film's only recognizable star was Maximilian Schell who played "K.", the surveyor.

Although the movie received decent critical response on its release, as a foreign film it would have received less than decent public response since American movie-goers are notoriously put-off by having to wrestle with the complexities of subtitles.

By the very nature of the prose style of Kafka's fiction his works do not make easily translatable properties for filming. The elliptical and evasive prose is hard to put on the screen, not impossible but just difficult, and without retaining...