Despite the System

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 latter-day 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. Through shooting scripts, internal memos, on-the-record interviews with protagonists, and Welles’ private correspondence and conversations, 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.

Reviews of Despite the System

"The book Orson Welles always hoped for" Peter Bogdanovich "Clear, engrossing… contentious" Mark Cousins "A detailed, well-constructed myth-busting history of a strand of Welles' career: his struggle with Hollywood." Observer "Proceeds from an enthusiasm for Welles as a film-maker rather than as a suitable case for treatment… highly recommended." Christopher Wood, The Times "It is wonderful to see a film biography trying to increase the reputation of its subject through intelligent criticism rather than drag it through the mud." The Times"