The Fountainhead (1949) Throughout the years, we've encountered any number of movies undeservedly described as "one of a kind"......
Here's one, that beyond a reasonable doubt, richly earns that categorization......
Whatever's left of our mind boggles at the thought of explaining the beliefs of the novelist, philosopher and would-be screenwriter Ayn Rand......(or as their popularly known, "objectivism").
Something along the lines of 'the individual's freedom and ideas outweigh any mass group working together for what's collectively known as The Greater Good'......in other words....every man for himself,...... live free or die hard and the with hell whatever the go-along get-along crowd thinks. Individual reason is everything and mass movements, like organized religion, communism, socialism and other authoritarian dogma are just opiates for the masses.......
Well.....more or less. We think....maybe.
In an unheard move for Warner Brothers (or Hollywood itself, for that matter), Rand, whose woeful attempts at movie scripts never saw the light of a projector, adapted her own bestselling novel for the screen.
"The Fountainhead", a long, verbose espousal of Rand's Objectivism thinly disguised as a novel, centered around Howard Roarke, a brilliant, uncompromising architect. Roarke, whose ultra-modern designs mimic those of Frank Lloyd Wright ,supposedly outrages the powers-that-be and general public with his stubborn individualism, creativity and his refusal to bend to mass opinion.
(The producers reached out to Wright to design the Roarke buildings shown in the film but balked at the legendary architect's $250,000 fee.....)
And in case you didn't get the ideas in play here, Rand's screenplay unaltered and untampered with, turns all of the film's dialogue into her precise, instructive philosophic rants on objectivism.
If this sounds like a somewhat bizarre technique for 1949 Hollywood studio product, you've got to see it in action to believe it.
Though set in New York City, the film sounds like it's taking place on another planet, where the inhabitants address each other only in stilted, grammatically correct platitudes......(much like outer space aliens in cheesy 1950's science fiction movies). So there's nothing in the film that sounds even close to normal human speech. )
Gary Cooper, that monotone, man-of-few-words icon, was Rand's personal choice to play the staunchly iconoclastic Roarke. And Cooper makes a valiant attempt to plow through all of Rand's declarative paragraphs as best he can, as does Patricia Neal as the heiress who adores him.....
(We did our best not to groan and snicker at the one and only scene where Rand's relentless speechifying takes a brief rest.......in which Neal falls deliriously in love as the sight of Cooper wielding a power drill, stroking its barrel he rams in into solid rock.......it's as close as this movie comes to being....uh....cinematic....)
And by all means, let's hear it for the usually stoic Cooper. In the film's looniest scene, he's put on trial for blowing up a construction site where his designs were altered by lesser architects. Acting as his own attorney, Cooper, in what must to must have amounted to 30 pages of Rand's impossible dialogue, delivers an endless speech outlining the principles of the author's objectivism to his jury. (Cooper revealed later that he never really understood any of it......)
Lucky for him, the jury's a philosophical bunch, ignoring the judge's instructions to render a verdict strictly based on the actual criminal offense.......which leads to a true Hollywood ending, with Neal ascending to the top of Cooper's latest creation......a phallus-like skyscraper where he's waiting at the very tip.......still rigid and unbowed.
Truly a sight to behold and listen to, "The Fountainhead", as offbeat as it is, deserves at least one viewing by any dedicated movie buff.......and then feel free to argue out its politics with whoever watches it with you and won't stop speaking to you if you disagree with each other 3 stars (***).
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