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Welles had arrived in Los Angeles in 1939 hoping to film Heart of Darkness. The project never came off, but the fascination with Conrad’s rotten and despairing Kurtz is unmistakable in the figures of Kane, Harry Lime in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), Quinlan in Touch of Evil and a clutch of Shakespearian tyrants — Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), Falstaff (1966) and Lear (on stage in 1956). It is a wonder that Welles had even 19 years on the fringes of Hollywood; his preoccupations were simply too exacting and subversive ever to find a home in the commercial ‘dream factory’. He admitted as much to fellow director Peter Bogdanovich during a discussion of The Trial (1962), Welles’s experimental version of Kafka:
You are supposed to have a very unpleasant time … Here I go and make [a] movie that I want people to see and not like. [But] that’s the paradox at the heart of all my work.
Welles was always going to fail in Hollywood, no matter how hard he tried to make concessions to the money men. But, as Heylin proves, try he did, for the most part in good faith, only to see his work maimed by other hands.
Despite the System significantly enhances our knowledge of Welles but it is a troublesome book. It has no proper scholarly apparatus (footnotes are in Heylin’s view ‘a tiresome practice’) and there are too many vulgar jibes at other writers (the ‘idea that Welles’s multi-layered way of making films might be anathema to the Hollywood system never patters across the man’s wrinkled cranium’). Especially regrettable is the fact that although Heylin takes some knowledge of Welles’s films for granted he has very little to say as to why even the mutilated ones continue to inspire reverence — and thus why, for many film-lovers, the loss of Welles’s Ambersons is so bitter.
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