Orson Welles was all too aware, in his later years, that posterity would judge his life to have been essentially a failure: that it would construct a neat parabola of decline that would arc down from his youthful masterpiece, 'Citizen Kane', to the wine adverts he used to fund his latterday imbibing.
In 'Despite The System' Clinton Heylin shows brilliantly how Welles was undone by real people, with real motives - and by the circumstances found in a single time and place, Hollywood at the end of its golden era - and yet still succeeded in forging a body of work that, whatever its flaws, is without equal in the history of cinema: 'Citizen Kane', 'The Magnificent Ambersons', 'Touch Of Evil', et. al. Through shooting scripts and internal memos, on-the-record interviews, private correspondence, Welles's own correspondence and articles and lectures to the public at large, Heylin grippingly reconstructs the career and life of a man who, by his own admission, was both a compulsive faker and perhaps the one true genius of the silver screen.
