THE FOUNTAINHEAD 1949

When it comes to The Fountainhead, I wish there was a way for me to return my mind back to the state of blissful ignorance I enjoyed the first time I saw this amazing film. That was many years ago. Back when The Fountainhead’s chief attractions for me were director King Vidor’s overripe, purple-prose approach to the material―a style always threatening to soar even more over-the-top than his notorious sex-and-sand opus, Duel in the Sun (1946)―and the overheated, over-emphatic screenplay by famed author, Ayn Rand, adapted from her hefty novel.

The plot of The Fountainhead: ruggedly individualistic architect Howard Roarke (Gary Cooper, still sexy, but looking a tad careworn at only 47) doing battle against a world of cartoonishly single-minded villains hell-bent on commodifying his genius—was always less interesting than its presentation. What I took delight in was The Fountainhead's dramatic persuasiveness: the application of a patently theatrical, artificial method of acting to a script of arch, over-embellished dialog, all in service of an extravagantly overwrought post-German Expressionist visual style. Ayn Rand’s verbose, almost feverishly nonsensical novel resisted any kind of realistic adaptation. King Vidor, never once rooting the film in any recognizable reality, managed to fashion a compellingly excessive film that served her work well.

Gary Cooper as Howard Roark

Patricia Neal as Dominique Francon

Raymond Massey as Gail Wynand

Robert Douglas as Ellsworth Toohey

As a dyed-in-the-wool visual aesthete whose lifelong relationship with film has been a battle with the influence of style over substance, I’m aware that my fondness for The Fountainhead has little to do with a sober assessment of its merits and faults as a story. I’m nuts about the movie chiefly because its visual style is so intoxicatingly curated. I respond on an almost visceral level to how dazzling it is to look at, and I marvel at how closely the performances, in all their profound solemnity, hew to that mannered, posturing style so expertly played for laughs in those old Carol Burnett Show movie spoofs. Indeed, in all the areas where The Fountainhead seems to overplay its hand (it makes its points early and easily, then goes on to reiterate those same points, ad nauseum, scene after scene), I don’t fault the film so much as chalk it up to a particular type of broad-strokes, post-war American filmmaking.

The window of the past can do that…things you’d find unforgivably false in a film today look perfectly acceptable in a black & white film from the late '40s.

 Examples of The Fountainhead's breathtaking cinematography (Robert Burks) and art direction (Edward Carrere).

Well, that’s how things started for me and how things remained for some time. Unfamiliar with Ayn Rand or her philosophy (in any direct way), I was content to revel in The Fountainhead’s overwrought romantic melodrama and ravishing imagery with nary a thought given to its portentous themes. Themes that, even as a callow youth, struck me as slightly sophomoric.

When, many years later, I finally got around to reading The Fountainhead, I was actually surprised, given its reputation, by what a windy polemic against Collectivism (the social philosophy that prioritizes group effort over the work of the individual) I found it to be. I enjoyed the novel’s descriptive passages very much and welcomed the fleshing out of the film’s slim characterizations, but felt its central plot was virtually buried beneath a lot of ideological redundancy. Still, given how intrigued I was by Rand's penchant for narrative overkill, I can't say I didn't enjoy the novel. So much so that I ventured forth to tackle her last and most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged. Bad move.

 I won’t turn this post into a diatribe against Objectivism (it's the narcissist's bible: the philosophy of self-interest) or the unfortunate adoption of Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s philosophies by so many of America’s most prominent sociopaths. But let’s just say that when it came to learning more about Ayn Rand’s philosophical beliefs, more proved to be decidedly less.

Flirting with Fascism
Ayn Rand liked to make it easy to identify the heroes and villains.
The villains have weak, effete names like Ellsworth Toohey, and are prone to striking 
dictatorial poses at the slightest provocation

  

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Before I'd read The Fountainhead, it never crossed my mind that the film adaptation was, in some ways, little more than a visual-aid lecture on Objectivism. I just thought it was a great-looking movie saddled with an overly obvious, poorly written screenplay. In viewing the film from Rand’s perspective, I can well imagine why she despised it; the power of King Vidor’s images overwhelms her words. 

And it's a good thing, too, because The Fountainhead is a real “movie lover’s” movie. By that, I don’t mean lovers of good film; I mean folks who love the stylized artificiality of film. Realism in film has its place, but films that speak to us through metaphor and symbolism (a good example is Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter) benefit greatly from the visual magic of modernism and the aesthetic drama of German Expressionism. The Fountainhead is such a film. 

It’s full of gorgeous cinematography, sumptuous sets, movie stars who look like movie stars, fabulous costumes, and soap-opera emotions. That none of it bears the slightest resemblance to human life as we know it only adds to its charm. 

The Fountainhead is one of those movies where people carry on entire conversations without ever looking directly at one another. Here, Patricia Neal assumes a familiar pose (looking off into the distance) while Raymond Massey and Gary Cooper try in vain to get her attention.

The Fountainhead had its Gala Premiere at the Warner Theater in Hollywood 
on Thursday, June 23, 1949

PERFORMANCES

I’ve always liked Patricia Neal. Her unadorned earthiness in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) and Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) was the best thing about those films. In a sea of lacquered, blonde bombshells, Neal was a home-grown Anna Magnani, reminding us that sex appeal didn’t require a bullet bra and the disavowal of intelligence. Familiar only with latter-day Neal, imagine my surprise in seeing her at 22, given the full Hollywood-glam treatment in The Fountainhead, her second film. She looks really stunning throughout.

Cast as The Fountainhead's sole female character, Dominique Francon (was a time you’d have to open a novel by Sidney Sheldon or Jackie Collins to find a name like that), Neal is first seen heaving a Greek statue out of the window of her high-rise apartment because, “I wanted to destroy it rather than let it be part of a world where beauty and genius and greatness have no chance!”

And if you think there’s not an actress on earth who can pull off dialogue like that, well, you’re right. It’s just the first of several scenes where Neal strives mightily against some of the strangest human dialogue ever committed to the page and forced to be uttered onscreen. She’s not always successful, but she’s never less than fascinating to watch. Juggling numerous lovers and a multitude of hard-to-fathom motives, Neal's Dominique Francon manages to be glacially aloof and sexually agitated at the same time. 

The character of Dominique Francon is a woman of high ideals who, before finding her spiritual equal in the noble Howard Roark, feels frustrated by having to live in a world that worships mediocrity. She vents her frustration by engaging in behavior favored by smart and successful women to this day: she intentionally becomes involved with inferior men. 

She chose her fiancé, the weak-willed Peter Keating, because “He was the most safely unimportant person I could find.” She later weds hack newspaperman Gail Wynand to make good on her promise, “If I ever decide to punish myself for some terrible guilt, I’ll marry you.” 

Dominique is nothing if not a gal with a few issues she needs to work out.

Obsessing over Howard Roark's drill

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Shave off all the whiskers and fluff from Rand’s one-sided proselytizing, and The Fountainhead is a pretty satisfying triangular love story with a few interesting things to say about society. The rather unconventional romance between Dominique and Howard (controversially incited in the novel by an off-putting rape, but, thanks to the usual stylistic obfuscation of sex in Production Code-era Hollywood, comes off in the film as the usual yes/no, male/female roundelay) is lent credence by the palpable chemistry between real-life lovers Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.

Any salient points Rand tries to make about the dangers of a society committed to the lowest common denominator (are you listening, Michael Bay, Vin Diesel, and Adam Sandler?) lack bite because, narratively, the deck is so heavily stacked in Roark's favor. With the villains depicted as simplistic paper tigers, there's virtually no conflict. And Gary Cooper (not the most expressive actor when it comes to dialogue) is asked to reiterate his character’s position so often that it creates the effect of someone trying to convince himself of an argument, not others.

Clip from "The Fountainhead" (1949)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Living in Los Angeles, a city of agonizingly random architecture, I can relate to all the heated design debates at the center of The Fountainhead.  Indeed, in establishing an analogical relationship to architecture and to any creative endeavor that must struggle to maintain its personal integrity in the face of public opinion, The Fountainhead is at its most successful. 

Dominique eyes Roarke's latest imposing erection

The fact that we live in a time when the evil and incompetent prosper; individuals justify the most heinous points of view with the assertion “I’m not the only one that feels this way!” (as if that were ever a gauge of honor); when ignorance is endorsed and education is labeled elitism by those left feeling inadequate in the presence of intelligence... all lead me to expect that The Fountainhead should feel more relevant than ever. 

Unfortunately, Ayn Rand can’t seem to get out of her own way long enough to let the points she wishes to make stand on their own merits of logic. Much like the character of Ellsworth Toohey, who feels he has to tell the public what to think, Rand doesn’t trust the viewer to weigh Objectivist issues for themselves. Rand's fondness for words prevents the medium of film from doing what it does best: evoke, not explain. Rand's handling of her own work is all too obvious. When I say The Fountainhead is black and white, I’m not just referring to the cinematography.

Ayn Rand wasn't fond of the architectural designs art director Edward Carrere used in the film. She wanted the buildings to reflect the works of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Watching the film today, it takes considerable effort to get my mind to relax and just let the movie entertain me as it did in the past. It feels like I spend the first ten minutes or so just trying to blot out the sermonizing. Mercifully, if I allow myself to focus on the sumptuous Max Steiner score (Gone With the Wind, Casablanca), and sink into Robert Burks’ rapturous cinematography (Vertigo, North by Northwest), pretty soon I’m back where I want to be. No longer a postulate at the lectern of Objectivism, just a movie fan enjoying a staggeringly gorgeous film.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012