PSYCHE 59 1964

Submerged passions and mid-‘60s elan ooze from every impressionist frame of Psyche 59, a dreamily stylish, low-simmer psychological drama with an irresistible title. The second feature film from American director Alexander Singer (whose debut, 1961’s A Cold Wind in August, infused a pulpy May-December sexploitation melodrama with something resembling poignance), Psyche 59 is a British production starring Patricia Neal in her first role following her Best Supporting Actress Oscar win for her earthy performance in Hud (1963). Psyche 59 has Neal, in a return to the kind of sophisticated characters she played in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and The Fountainhead (1949), trading in her A Face in the Crowd/Hud housedresses and Kentucky drawl for Paris couture and posh urban neurosis.

Neal plays Allison Crawford, a wealthy Londoner with a townhouse, two daughters, a live-in nanny, and a rakishly handsome industrialist husband named Eric (Curt Jurgens). Filling out Allison’s well-upholstered life is the extended-family-of-sorts represented by devoted friend and business associate Paul (Ian Bannen); her perceptive, astrology-ruled grandmother ( Beatrix Lehmann); and the return of the prodigal sibling...Allison’s vixenish baby sister Robin (Samantha Eggar), self-invited back into the family fold after a failed marriage in America. 

And one other little detail...five years ago, Allison was struck blind. 

Patricia Neal as Allison Crawford

Curt Jurgens as Eric

Samantha Eggar as Robin Crawford

Ian Bannen as Paul

It was five years ago, on the night her second child was born, Allison was stricken blind after she fell down a flight of stairs in her home. But doctors have determined that the loss of sight is not the result of an injury sustained in the fall, but rather—like the plight of the titular character of The Who’s 1969 rock-opera Tommy—a psychosomatic, shock-induced reaction to witnessing something traumatic. Alas, Allison can't remember a thing about that night except being awakened by labor pains, finding her husband missing from their bed, and leaving the bedroom to look for him. At this point, she draws a blank. All attempts to reconstruct the further events of that evening in her mind are met with piercing headaches and a subconscious resistance: “My brain won’t accept the images my eyes make.”

We viewers, however, face no such resistance. Both the source and content of Allison’s trauma becomes crystal clear the instant we lay eyes on baby sister Robin—a laser-eyed chaos agent on two very long and shapely legs—and see how angry and agitated (i.e., hot and bothered) Eric becomes at the mere thought of her re-insinuating herself into their lives. Although Allison remains clueless, the film doesn't waste time mounting false suspense over the question of "Did they, or didn't they?" (They did.) Rather, we're left to wonder if a woman as intelligent and sensitive as Allison can really be so oblivious to events blatantly happening directly under her nose and "right before her very eyes," or if, in causing her to lose both her sight and her memory of that night, is her mind shielding her or simply carrying out her will? 

Just how much Allison does know or doesn't know is the ambiguous tease and Freudian thrust of Psyche 59...an arthouse-influenced mood piece of deceit and self-deception among the literally and figuratively blind. A film about subjective honesty, emotional truth, and coming to terms with the fact that...at least in matters of the heart...insight is inarguably more eloquent than sight. 

Lady in the Dark
"I can tell you what the psychiatrist said. I'm afraid to see. There's something I'm afraid to look at."

I‘m not sure how it is I never heard of Psyche 59 until now, but this kind of erotically-charged domestic dysfunction psychodrama—to use an appropriately UK idiom—ticks all the right boxes for me. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the feel of the film is strictly European arthouse, but its premise—a wealthy woman driven hysterically blind by obsessive love—is pure studio-era Joan Crawford. The film’s photogenic cast, forming a kind of 4-character chamber ensemble, play disparate, desperate individuals caught up in a mating-dance roundelay of unrequited love and unreciprocated desire. The structure of their thorny interrelationships a psychological hall-of-mirrors where what most needs to be sad is never uttered and no two are ever in love unless it’s with the absolute wrong person at the worst possible time.

While taking in the emotionally inarticulate fumblings of Psyche 59's passion-ruled characters, my mind kept flashing to the romantic entanglements in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, the 1973 Broadway musical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). There’s nothing light or farcical about Psyche 59's somber quartet, but once they all go traipsing off for an ill-fated holiday in the country, the memory of Sondheim's lyrics underscored every day's little death.

He assumes I lose my reason. And I do.

Men are stupid. Men are vain.

Love's disgusting. Love's insane.

A humiliating business.

Oh, how true!

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As I’ve mentioned, I think Psyche 59 is an absolutely fabulous title for a movie. It’s certainly evocative. Too much so, perhaps, as it initially had me anticipating a suspense thriller along the lines of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 (1963). Psyche 59 is the title of the 1959 French novel by Françoise des Ligneris upon which Julian Halevy’s oblique screenplay is based. The title’s numerical significance appears to be linked to its contemporaneity: the 1963 English edition was titled Psyche 63. The film version never explains the title’s meaning, leaving us with the suggestion (set in London, 1964 and Allison & Eric’s second daughter looks to be about 5-years-old) that it applies to the year of Allison's psychological breakdown.

Beatrix Lehmann as Mrs. Crawford (Allison & Robin's grandmother)

The  ”Psyche” of the title has a bifurcated significance to the narrative, most explicitly as it pertains to the psyche of Freudian psychological theory. This is psyche defined as the housing of the human personality (the id, ego, and superego) as it relates to the conscious and subconscious mind.

Allison, a woman we come to learn was blind long before she lost the ability to see, allows her subconscious to erase what her conscious mind is unwilling to face. In the tradition of true Freudian symbolism, the warring components of Allison’s inner personality crisis manifest themselves externally in her relationships: Robin is the sexually impulsive id; the sincere and stable Paul, the ego; and her grandmother is the judgemental, guilt-tripping superego.

Who's in control, the rider or the horse?
Horses are both motif and symbol in Psyche 59, referencing a Freudian analogy comparing the id to a wild horse and the ego as the rider who must control and guide its path

But Psyche 59 is also a contemporary reworking of the Greek myth of Psyche, the goddess of the soul. The parallels abound. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, vows revenge on the mortal Psyche for stealing the attentions of men (Robin sees Allison as having stolen Eric from her). Psyche’s father abandons her on a mountaintop (Allison and Robin were abandoned by their father) where she is fated by the gods to marry a cruel and savage beast (that would be Eric), a beast whose hideous form Psyche is forbidden to gaze upon (psychosomatic blindness). Unable to see his form, Psyche falls in love with the man she imagines him to be. The beast is actually Eros the god of love and fertility (the virile Eric/Eros harbors a god-like image of himself). I won’t go into how further events play out, only adding that Greek myths are not generally known for their happy endings.

Eric and Paul represent the two combative 
  aspects of love...the physical & the emotional

PERFORMANCES
Effective as an ensemble, rising to the occasion when given their moments to shine in individual scenes, Psyche 59 may be sparsely populated, but its few roles are extremely well cast.  It's no surprise that the always-wonderful Patricia Neal gives a sensitive and compelling performance (even with her eyes shaded, there's no barrier to us knowing what her character is feeling). Like her subtextual namesake, she's the soul of this movie. This is the second film I've seen in which Samantha Eggar plays a femme fatale (my first was Return from the Ashes - 1965) and I've fallen in love. She may be the least-experienced member of the cast, but I think she gives a hell of a performance. More to my liking than her great work in The Collector (1965). 

Judging You
Beatrix Lehmann registers strongly in a small but pivotal role. 

I've seen talented character actor Ian Bannen in many things, but mostly from late in his career. I had no idea he was such a babe! Distractingly handsome appearance aside, his character is not showy, but in his quietude, he's fascinating to watch. Bannen's catalog of disdainful looks aimed at Curt Jurgen are a virtual lexicon of disgust. Jurgens, an actor who has heretofore never registered much on my radar because he always seemed to be cast as something officious and stern, caught me off guard in his ability to exude genuine dominating sex appeal of the sort that has little to do with looks, and all to do with attitude. If Neal is the soul of the film, Jurgens is the magnetism.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Though they can sometimes prove grueling, I have a soft spot for self-serious dramas about neurotic women in stylish hats agonizing over louche husbands (a la The Pumpkin Eater – 1963). Especially if every frame of their suffering looks as though it were shot by Richard Avedon. And looks do count for a great deal in Psyche 59, a Gallic-flavored psycho-sexual soufflé about sight that I feel intentionally emphasizes the visual in its storytelling (the viewer is encouraged to not just look, but see) as a means of underscoring Allison’s inability/unwillingness to open her eyes. The striking cinematography is by Walter Lassalley (Oscar winner for Zorba the Greek - 1964) and is the real name-above-the-title star of Psyche 59. Frequently, the intensity of Lassalley's gorgeous high-contrast B&W cinematography achieves an intensity that is heart-achingly moving.

I love this shot. It's from a lovely scene where Allison & Robin allow their affection for one another to show. Allison, unable to see, reaches out to touch Robin, and in the effort, winds up shielding her eyes from the sun. Robin's move to guide her sister's hand ultimately turns into a caress. Hands and the sense of touch are another recurring visual motif in the film, touch being the only means by which Psyche was initially able to "see" Eros in the myth.

Because I dote on movies about character conflict, Psyche 59 practically qualifies as an action movie for me. But I fully understand how a leisurely-paced film such as this might call to mind for some another A Little Night Music lyric: “So inactive that one has to lie down.”

I'm Your Venus
Robin, reassuring herself of her power to allure, assumes an "armless"
de Milo-esque pose in a department store changing room

I can’t help but recognize that some of the major factors contributing to my finding Psyche 59 so utterly fascinating are its similarities to Mike Nichols’ trilogy of marital dysfunction: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Carnal Knowledge (1970), and Closer (2004); three films that speak to love’s vulnerability to willful self-deception. Psyche 59 is a worthy addition to my collection, not a masterpiece, but a film so pleasingly guarded with its intentions, yet so self-assured (like Eric), it allows itself to be misunderstood. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2020

THE NIGHT DIGGER 1971

In the little-known (but much-beloved by me) psychological thriller The Night Digger (The Road Builder in the UK), Patricia Neal portrays Maura Prince, a 43-year-old recovering stroke survivor who works part-time at a hospital helping other stroke victims relearn to speak. That the 44-year-old Patricia Neal had, in 1965, actually suffered a series of debilitating strokes which left her having to relearn how to walk and talk, adds a layer of autobiographical poignancy to both her character and performance.

Single and childless, Maura is what was once known as a spinster. A spinster who, when not stealing away for those brief-but-rewarding two hours a week at the hospital, is at the harried beck and call of her blind and ailing adoptive mother Edith Prince (Pamela Brown). The two women live alone in a somewhat secluded area in the Berkshire district of England in a cavernous old Victorian mansion whose facade, much like Maura herself, shows the wear of years of neglect and abuse. 

Patricia Neal as Maura Prince

Pamela Brown as Mrs. Edith Prince

Nicholas Clay as Billy Jarvis

Left with both a limp and frozen hand from her stroke, Maura dresses dowdily, looks older than her age, and walks with the weighted-down posture and downcast eyes of the defeated. She's a woman with a broken spirit, only part of which can be said to be attributable to her disability.
Yet in spite of the air of forlorn resignation which seems to follow her around like a personal storm cloud, Maura is surprisingly clear-minded and unsentimental about her lot in life. She harbors no illusions as to why, at age 15, she was adopted by the newly widowed Mrs. Prince (to serve as the elder woman’s free-of-charge live-in maid, cook, nurse, and whipping post); nor does she kid herself as to why she has allowed herself to be subjected to the interfering dominance of her mother for so many years.

Guilt and a sense of duty play a part, for it was her mother who nursed Maura back to health following her stroke. A stroke she had the misfortune of suffering mere months after running away (escaping?) with a man who would later come to abandon her. Yes, guilt and duty play a part, but loneliness seals the bargain. Maura submits to her mother’s strong-willed dominance simply because she has nothing and no one else in her life.

Together, these women live a life of claustrophobic co-dependency in an atmosphere of by-now-routine rituals of passive-aggressive resentment: Maura taking silent, unseen delight in her mother’s food-scattering efforts to feed herself; Edith basking in private, sadistic satisfaction whenever she's granted the opportunity to inflict some petty inconvenience on her daughter.

While gossipy Edith—who’s not above feigning a heart attack to get her way—shares the companionship of two equally talebearing neighbors (Jean Anderson & Graham Crowden); Maura, beyond her duties at the hospital, lives a life solitary and internal. But if her sunlit, pink-hued, hyperfeminine, and meticulously cared-for bedroom is any indication, one can safely assume Maura’s inner life is a vividly romantic one.

See No Evil and Hear No Evil get an earful from Speak No Evil

If there's nothing real to gossip about, Edith and best friends Millicent McMurtrey
 (Anderson) and Mr. Bolton (Crowden) sometimes have to resort to invention

Into this stifling yet drafty environment rides Billy Jarvis (Nicholas Clay), a boy of 20 who mysteriously turns up at precisely the moment the women are in need of someone to perform gardening and maintenance chores around the house. Claiming to be a friend of a friend’s nephew, it’s obvious from the start that Billy is a facile (if not particularly adroit) liar, but the means by which he actually comes to know of this particular job opportunity remains one of the many mysteries surrounding the young man's arrival.

Ever the skeptic, Maura sees easily through Billy's lies, but Edith—if perhaps only to annoy Maura—finds herself charmed by the boy's hard-luck stories (invalid mother died in a fire) and sincere avowals of religious fealty (a lie which later comes to bite him on the ass). After half-convincing herself that Billy might actually be a distant relative...a delusional leap of faith more designed to silence local gossip, Edith invites the boy to stay on as their unpaid laborer/houseguest. In Maura’s room, no less. Understandably overjoyed, Billy, who's been living an itinerant existence as a road builder, moves in immediately, his only possessions being his motorbike and a mysterious bundle secured by a leather harness (“Your Bible and prayer book, I suppose?” Maura sarcastically intones).

When forced to give up her room to the handyman, it's revealed that everything about Maura's room stands in stark contrast to the dark, drab, disarray of the rest of the house. It's our first indication that Maura, like Billy, might be quite different than she first appears.

The introduction into the household of an additional target for Edith’s whip-cracking has the unforeseen result of creating a tacit bond between the appreciative Billy and the emotionally guarded Maura. An empathetic, almost maternal-filial bond that comes to threaten the long-established dynamic between Maura and her mother. A bond that soon evolves into something eminently deeper, infinitely more complex, and ultimately, with the town suddenly terrorized by a serial killer known as The Traveling Maniac, ominous and macabre.  

The Night Digger is an unusual film. An odd, not-to-everyone's-taste motion picture in many ways deserving of its exploitative advertising tagline "A tale of the strange and perverse."  And while it's not a perfect film--a fact most evident in the somewhat rushed feel of the film's third act--the sublime deliberateness of its earlier scenes, combined with the richness of its characterizations, gives the film the feel of an undiscovered, underappreciated gem. (The Night Digger had a troubled shoot involving much script-tinkering and clashes with the composer. Neither Neal nor Dahl were pleased with the results, labeling the final edit "pornographic.")

Saddled with a terrible title and somewhat misleading marketing campaign more befitting a grindhouse slasher or exercise in hagsploitation; The Night Digger is a film so unusual I'm not entirely sure it would have found an audience even if its US distributors had not given up on it so quickly.

The Night Digger is an atmospheric suspense film more in line with art-house thrillers like Robert Altman's Images (1972) or unconventional character dramas like Michael Apted's The Triple Echo (1972). Critics have commented upon similarities to Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher (1971), but when I first saw The Night Digger, the films it most evoked for me were Night Must Fall (particularly the 1964 Albert Finney remake of the 1937 classic), and especially Altman's (again) That Cold Day in the Park. What The Night Digger shares with the 1969 Sandy Dennis starrer is a quality I'm drawn to in so many of my favorite films from the late-'60s/early-'70s: a willingness to allow a story to go to unexpected places. The Night Digger is an intriguing, emotionally provocative thriller containing just enough touches of humor and humanity to offset its pitch-black edges. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’ve little doubt that the things I love the most about The Night Digger are precisely the things that contributed to it being a film 1971 audiences (and its US distributor, MGM) showed so little interest in that it wound up being shelved not long after brief playoffs in limited markets. For me, The Night Digger's chief appeal is in the way it doesn’t settle easily into any particular genre classification.
Promoted as a psychological suspense thriller, The Night Digger, with its measured, seriocomic tone and glum atmosphere of neurosis and dread, is a compellingly effective Hitchcockian melodrama (a major asset being its terrifically creepy score by eight-time Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann). But the “thriller” nomenclature doesn’t fully allow for the fact that the film is at its strongest and most affecting when focused on the interplay of the characters.
At these moments, The Night Digger is a sensitively observed character drama about the despairing interactions of damaged people. People disabled in ways both visible and concealed who allow their lives to be ruled, ruined, or possibly reclaimed by their infirmity. This angle of the film is, for me, its most rewarding, for it effectively invests you in the fates of its characters before things start to shift into full-tilt weirdness. Once the unconventional love story starts to merge with the disturbing serial killer subplot, it's too late...you're hooked.

The emotional burden of dysfunction - be it physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual -
is at the core of Roald Dahl's unsettling screenplay for The Night Digger

The Night Digger’s offbeat tone and jet-black comedy are largely owed to the contributions of screenwriter Roald Dahl (You Only Live Twice, The Witches, Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory). The story goes that Dahl purchased the rights to Joy Cowley’s 1967 novel Nest in a Falling Tree expressly for wife Patricia Neal (whom he painstakingly nursed back to health following her stroke), after her Oscar-nominated return to the screen in The Subject Was Roses (1968) failed to yield further job offers.

It’s Dahl who devised the film's serial killer plotline (not present at all in Cowley’s book) and rewrote the character of Maura as a stroke survivor. These revisions create effectively disorienting tonal shifts in the film's narrative reminiscent of Willy Wonka's terrifying boat ride or the introduction of the memorably terrifying Child Catcher into his otherwise sweet and sunny Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In The Night Digger, these tonal shifts—some delicate, others shockingly abrupt—play out with a sinister purposefulness well-suited to the film’s atmosphere of intensifying unease. Every time you think you’ve figured out where The Night Digger is headed, it throws you a curve.

Peter Sallis and Yootha Joyce as Reverend Palafox and Mrs. Palafox
contribute a hilarious bit as the objects of spurious speculation 

Movies fail for all sorts of reasons, but one of The Night Digger’s biggest hurdles had to have been the fact that an audience most receptive to a movie starring Patricia Neal was also an audience least likely to be welcoming of the film's nudity, violence, and lurid themes. Conversely, those in search of the kind of bloody mayhem normally associated with an R-rated serial-killer movie must have felt as though the rug had been pulled out from under them when confronted with a quaint senior citizen suspenser about a lonely spinster and her elderly mum.
So, how then is it that The Night Digger ranks as one of my favorite films? I guess because I fit the seldom-courted “sentimental dirty old man” demographic.

PERFORMANCES
Both Patricia Neal (The Fountainhead) and Pamela Brown (Secret Ceremony) give truly fine performances in The Night Digger. Neal, who usually commands every scene she's in with that marvelous voice and natural acting style, is given fair and equal support in Pamela Brown, an endlessly resourceful actress with an uncanny ability to convey multiple dimensions of her somewhat reprehensible character all at once. I absolutely adore Patricia Neal and think she gives a performance worthy of another Oscar nomination (had anyone actually seen the film) playing a strong woman who's come to define herself by her weaknesses.
The mother/daughter scenes she shares with Brown are so good (like watching an absorbing two-character stage play) I confess to having initially felt a twinge of regret once the story necessitated the introduction of a supporting cast. Happily, as I so often find to be the case with UK films made during this time, the level of talent assembled for the supporting cast (especially Jean Anderson) is beyond impressive.

Making his film debut in The Night Digger is the late Nicholas Clay (Evil Under The Sun), a favorite actor whose genuine talent I tend to undervalue because of his looks and his (blessed) tendency to take on roles requiring him to appear in various states of undress. The Night Digger sets a fine career precedent, nudity-wise, but it’s nice to report he also gives a solid and very engaging performance here, rounding out an overall exceptional cast.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I saw The Night Digger for the first time just a few years ago when it aired on TCM, but I remember wanting to see it back when it opened in San Francisco in 1971. At the time I didn’t really know who Patricia Neal was (her Maxim coffee ads and Waltons TV movie would come later) but my eye was caught by the newspaper ad and I was fascinated. Unfortunately, the ad also happened to catch my mother’s eye, the prominent presence of the word “perverse” in the ad copy effectively putting the kibosh on any hopes I had of finding out what this creepy-looking film with the cryptic title was all about.

It took a while, but in finally having the opportunity to see The Night Digger (several decades past that must-be-17-years-of-age hurdle), it's clear to me that I would have liked it in’71, but I’m positive it's provided me with a much richer experience seeing it today.
Always a sucker for films about the intrinsic human need to connect and the agony we put ourselves through trying to convince ourselves otherwise; there's a poignancy and pathos to the plight of the film’s characters that would have likely been a bit over my head as an adolescent. What the film has to say about the paradox of growth: that growing up inevitability leads to separation/that growing closer invariably increases one’s chances of being hurt—strikes the kind of emotional chord with me today that is unlikely to have been stirred at all at when I was twelve.

Similarly, I'm fairly sure that as a young man, I'd have taken the more gruesome elements of the story out of context. That is to say, I'd likely have looked upon the film's structure - which is to juxtapose scenes of inhumanity with moving passages of emotional longing - as being merely dramatic or "action-packed."

Having lived long enough to understand that part of life is making peace with the eternal coexistence of the gentle and the monstrous (the latter too often a result of a lack of the former); the violent events in The Night Digger don't feel as arbitrary to me as they might have. On the whole, what I like about the film and what I take away from it (and this is 100% my subjective take on a film I love, not a recommendation) is that it resonates with me as a nightmare fable about the life-defining events of our lives and how we choose to be ruled by them, or ultimately choose to grow to rule over ourselves.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

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 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 dramatic persuasiveness of The Fountainhead applying a patently theatrical and 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, in never once rooting the film in any kind of recognizable reality, managed to fashion an 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. I’m nuts about the movie chiefly because it’s so visually striking and intoxicatingly stylized. 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 so closely to that mannered, posturing style so expertly played for laughs in those old Carol Burnett Show movie spoofs. Indeed, in all of 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 find 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 at what a windy polemic against Collectivism it was. I enjoyed the novel’s descriptive passages very much, and welcomed the fleshing out of the slim characterizations of the film, but its central plot was almost buried below a lot of ideological redundancies. It was nevertheless a book I enjoyed immensely, and, intrigued by Rand’s penchant for narrative overkill, I ventured forth and tackled her last and most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged. Bad move.

 I won’t turn this post into a diatribe against Objectivism or the unfortunate adoption of Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s philosophies by America’s Tea Party Movement. But let’s just say that when it came to learning more about Ayn Rand’s philosophical beliefs, more was 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 had 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 over-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 overwhelm her words. 

And it's a good thing, too, for The Fountainhead is a real “movie lover”s movie. And 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 attempt to speak to us through metaphor or symbolism (like Charles Laughton’s The Night of The Hunter) benefit greatly from an overabundance of cinematic stylization. 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.

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) were the best things 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. I had no idea she could be so stunning.

Cast as Dominique Francon The Fountainhead’s sole female character (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 dialog 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 page. She’s not always successful, but she’s never less than fascinating to watch. Juggling numerous lovers and hard-to-fathom-motives, she manages to be glacially aloof and sexually agitated at the same time. 

Dominique Francon is a woman of high ideals who, before finding her spiritual equal in the noble Howard Roark, feels frustrated at 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. 

Her fiancé, the weak-willed Peter Keating, she chose 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 proselyting. 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.

The rather salient points made by Rand about the dangers of a society committed to the lowest common denominator (are you listening Michael Bay, Vin Diesel, and Adam Sandler?) lack the bite they might have due to the deck being so heavily stacked on the side of Roark and his philosophy. The story tilts so far in his favor there's almost no real conflict. Indeed, Gary Cooper (not the most expressive actor when it comes to dialog) 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.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Living in Los Angeles, a city of agonizingly random architectural design, I can identify with all the heated discussions on design that take place in The Fountainhead.  Indeed, in establishing an analogical relationship to architecture and any creative endeavor which must struggle to maintain its personal integrity in the face of public opinion, The Fountainhead is at its most successful. In this age when individuals justify the most heinous points-of-view with the claim “I’m not the only one that feels this way!” (as if that was ever a gauge of honor), and when widespread ignorance is proudly defended as anti-intellectual-elitism, 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. 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 the issues of Objectivism for themselves. Rand's fondness for words fails to let the medium of film do 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