King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949) is a strident melodrama based on Ayn Rand's famous (and notorious) novel. Rand wrote the script and the movie veers frantically between over-the-top sado-masochism and bizarre political posturing. The whole enterprise is pretty much insane, full of whacky speeches that you might associate with an Ed Wood production. For better or worse, this is a film about ideas and adheres scrupulously to the political philosophy that Rand promotes, a sort of radical "egotism" that seems derived from Nietzsche -- it's about the triumph of the Will, a melange of bodice-ripping rape fantasies with half-baked Nietzsche (and, in fairness to Rand one must note that the Nietzschean original, The Will to Power, was never fully cooked in the first-place.) The movie has a sort of crazy integrity -- it's not wishy-washy and it stands for something, that's for sure. Rand's script doesn't compromise and Vidor's lavishly direction doesn't compromise either -- if anything, Vidor amplifies the madness implicit in Rand's text. But, it seems to me that the picture's politics are as insane as the film's narrative and bombastic mise-en-scene. With it's weird sexual dynamics and a climax that is brazenly unrealistic (it's purely wish-fulfillment), the movie is bigger-than-life, operatic, wildly overwrought -- it feels very similar in its excesses to Vidor's 1946 epic Western, Duel in the Sun.
Gary Cooper plays Howard Roark, an architect obviously modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright. (His plans could be rejects from Wright's Taliesin designs.) At first, we see Cooper's designs being rejected by several firms with which he is seeking employment. After some speechifying about Truth and Integrity, Roark gets hired by a man who is meant to simulate Louis Sullivan, Wright's mentor and, with Dankmar Adler, his first employer. Like Sullivan, Roark's boss is a drunk and wanders the streets in a delirium. An evil media mogul, Wynand (played by Raymond Massey) is persecuting Roark's boss for his radical designs and his dictum that 'form follows function.' Roark opens his own office but his tedious and argumentative "integrity" scare away clients. And, in any event, Wynand's tabloid newspaper, The Banner delights in persecuting Roark --the real villain of the piece is a nasty architecture critic, a fancy-pants writer named Ellsworth Toohy. (It will give you a sense for this picture's insane plot that the main story involves conflict between two architecture critics, a plucky girl named Dominique Frankon and the power-hungry Ellsworth Toohy. Issues of beaux arts esthetics (the "bozart" as Mencken sardonically called it) versus Roark's prairie-school modernism mirror, it seems, the clash between collectivism, with Bolshevik implications, and good old American individualism. The film posits a world in which mobs of people are whipped into a violent frenzy over whether a skyscraper stands on modernist stilts or has a classical facade at street-level -- in other words, the movie takes place in a fantasy-land as weird and remote from every day life as Oz is from Kansas.) Wyand needs a designer for a skyscraper bank building. He tempts Roark but the architect refuses to bow to his demands that the design incorporate classical or beaux arts elements. Roark turns down all commissions that don't allow him complete autonomy. In the context of the movie industry, The Fountainhead sometimes reads as a parable about the conflict between art and money that is central to moviemaking. In these introductory sequences, Wynand's girl architecture critic praises Roark's work and yearns to meet him; Wynand is in love with the beautiful young woman who is herself the daughter of a sell-out architect -- a strange twist that adds an oedipal subtext to the perfervid proceedings. Roark's uncompromising refusal to accommodate his clients results in the failure of his firm. We next see him running a rock-drill in a vast, cubist quarry that just happens to be next door to the mansion where Dominique Frankon (Patricia Neal), the girl architecture critic, spends her time lounging around in silk pajamas and galloping about on her horse in dominatrix get-up wielding a riding crop. Dominique has espied Roark manfully driving his iron drill through rock and fantasizes about the hunky laborer -- we see her face dissolving into shots of the rock-drill penetrating marble. She tries to seduce Roark, but he's too proud to succumb to her blandishments. Dominique, then, uses a fireplace poker to smash up the marble on her bedroom chimney, summoning Roark to her chambers and demanding that he fix the ruined stone. She tries to rape him. He rejects her again and, so, the next day, she rides to where the laborers are leaving the quarry and slashes Roark across the face with her riding crop -- cutting s big gash in Gary Cooper's cheek. (This stuff has to be seen to be believed.) Thwarted, Dominique hurries back to Manhattan where she accepts Wynand's standing offer of marriage -- although she tells the mogul directly that she doesn't love him. Roark returns to Manhattan as well and gets a commission to build a gas station (presumably the famous Cloquet, Minnesota station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) and, then, accepts, on his own terms, larger and larger projects until he has become famous. Roark designs a big apartment called the Ellsworth House (it looks like a slender and finned radiator). Wynand, the newspaper boss, he is a bit like Charles Foster Kane, gets his lap-dog architecture critic Ellsworth Toohy to denounce the structure even though Wynand's wife, Dominique, admires it. People get all hot and bothered over the structure -- a mob mentality, an important theme and betes noir for Rand, threatens the man of principle, Roark; the building is said to be an eye-sore. Wynand, probably a bit miffed over his wife's love for Roark, says he will use his paper (and Toohy) to destroy the architect. Then, when he finds that he can't cow Roark into submission, Wynand shifts course and becomes the architect's greatest admirer. In fact, Wynand who is helplessly in love with his wife, Dominique (who heartily despises him) pays Roark a kingly sum to build a huge home for the couple, a "temple to (his wife.)" At this point, Wynand seems to be as much in love with Roark as his wife. This sets up a lavishly melodramatic triangle in which Dominique again sets her sights on the intransigent Roark (whose motto remains non serviam) notwithstanding Wynand's love for her. A hack architect is hired to build a huge low-rent (publicly subsidized it seems) housing complex, the Courtland project. The hack architect has no ideas as to how to build cheaply and, yet, with skill -- this, of course, is Roark's expertise. So the hack persuades Roark to design the Courtland Housing project without attribution to him; Roark agrees to this quixotic task but, on the proviso, that no changes of any kind be implemented in his designs. But the hack architect can't control the public housing client and the administrators of the project demand changes. The ostensible architect on the project has no choice but to make the changes, disfiguring horribly Roark's austere modernist plans. Roark is not a man to be trifled with. He sends Dominique, who is now his girlfriend (sort of), to the housing project which is partly completed. (I wasn't able to figure out why Roark sends his mistress into the middle of an explosion.) Roark blows up the whole site and everything on it, allowing himself to be captured after some apocalyptic imagery of explosions, with the dynamite plunger in his hand. Meanwhile, Roark has also agreed to erect the tallest structure on earth over the Hell's Kitchen slum where Wynand was born and raised -- this will be a monument to Wynand and his empire. In the explosion, Dominique picks up some glass hurled at her by the blast and severs an artery in her wrist in a suicide attempt -- I couldn't figure out why; by this time, the story has gone completely off the rails with bizarre love-scenes (like scorpions mating) between Roark and Dominique; she pretends to resist him and he pretends to rape her. Roark is put on trial, not surprisingly, for blowing up his own project. Ellsworth Toohy, leaves the employ of The Banner, and lures all of Wynand's journalists away from their jobs at the paper. (It seems that he has been secretly courting the army of writers and print-setters so that he can summon them away from The Banner to a eompetitor stranding Wynand alone (except for Dominique) in the huge news room.) Toohy's architectural writing must be pretty good, because without his column on New York buildings The Banner collapses completely. From his perch with a competitor of The Banner, Toohy stirs up the "collective", the mob, to attack Roark and, also, destroy The Banner as well. But, at the trial, Roark (who is representing himself pro se) delivers an impassioned speech about the importance of the individual in opposing the hive-mind of the collective. Gary Cooper isn't equal to this speech which is a bizarre harangue about integrity and the Will to Power. He recites his lines robotically, but somehow they take root in the minds of the jury. Roark is acquitted, even though he has admitted publicly that he blew up the low-income housing project. Wynand, bankrupt and alone in his news room, commits suicide. In the final scene, Dominique, who is now married to Roark, goes to the site of the tallest skyscraper in the world, built over the ruins of the slum neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen. She rides an open elevator high into the sky to the very pinnacle of the tower where Roark stands, wind blowing in his garments and a mallet in his fist, the master builder atop the biggest erection in the world.
The Fountainhead is less than two hours, but feels like an odyssey that is much longer. Vidor shoots the movie is an imperial style. Everything is bigger than you expect, larger and more lavish. Wynand's offices have huge windows that show all the architectural masterpieces of Manhattan rising from concrete jungles and walls are decorated with large Piranesi engravings of the ruins of Rome. Houses are equipped with vast gleaming stairways and enormous vaulted rooms in which scores of people sipping cocktails and dressed in evening clothes gather. In the quarry where Roark labors, shots show a landscape of white rock, a gorge that is a hundred feet deep and crawling with thirty or forty laborers drilling at the marble faces. We first see Dominique hurling a Greco-Roman (Hellenic) torso of a god down an airshaft -- she is destroying the artifact because she loves its so much she would be in thrall to its beauty if she didn't pitch it into the abyss. (This is a key and precursor to the sado-masochistic relationship with Howard Roark.) The movie isn't afraid to dramatize its philosophical propositions in the fiercest way imaginable. Roark blows up low-income housing presumably designed to provide the poor with decent places to live -- it's not a rich man's vanity project that he wrecks, but something useful, socially important, and, even, necessary, more like a bridge than a church or factory or office building. (The role of the poor in the movie is interesting and problematic -- the picture's characters are resolutely against both welfare and empathy, seen as instruments covertly destroying human initiative.) As if conscious of the social cost associated with Roark's grandiose and perverse act of vandalism, the judge, when he instructs the jury, makes a distinction between criminal and civil liability. Roark, it is implied, may well be liable for breach of contract in a civil proceeding, but he shouldn't be found criminally culpable for destroying his own project when the authorities tamper with his sacrosanct design. It's all larger-than-life: when Dominique ascends to the master-builder on his tower, the elevator just goes up and up and up.
I don't like this movie. It's palpably absurd and nonsensical. But it is certainly well-built and the individual scenes are both powerful and lunatic at the same time. (This is particularly true of the quarry sequence.) It's hard to articulate what's exactly wrong with ideas expressed in the movie. If you concede their premise, then, you will have to accept the film's logic -- that is, that the only thing that matters in the world is the iron will of the genius and that a man of genius has the right to ignore all conventions, including conventional morality, in pursuit of his vision. The existence of the movie, however, shows that this idea is wrong. No one man makes a movie. A movie is the product of an army of people contributing ideas and their skills to the end-product. An architect's ideas will remain unrealized unless there are contractors, bankers, plumbers and electricians, real estate and contract lawyers and a thousand other interdependent trades involved in prosecuting the physical, financial and social labor required to enact the vision. No one makes it on his own. And, so, the premise that the man of genius stands apart from the mob is false. The man of genius, most often, is the living, breathing embodiment of the mob mentality -- not its opposite. There are probably many other reasons for rejecting Ayn Rand's ideas. But in The Fountainhead, Vidor has certainly represented her philosophy in the most lavish, and, I think, faithful terms possible.
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