In Despite The System Clinton Heylin shows brilliantly how Welles was undone by real people, with real motives, 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. Using shooting scripts, internal memos, on-the-record interviews and private correspondence, 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.