THE FOUNTAINHEAD
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
Lovers of old films claim King Vidor's 1949 version of Ayn Rand's THE FOUNTAINHEAD is among the most neglected of classic bad movies. They're right. Scorned because of Rand's Objectivism -- in a nutshell the antithesis of altruism -- and attacked because its style reeked with cheapie film noir effects, the movie never got the audience it deserved until revival houses flourished in the 60s and 70s and, later, became available on video. Hard to imagine audiences in 1949 not liking it, especially since the rapid fire invective against collectivism is screamingly funny: "Give in, compromise, you'll have to later anyway"; "You can't stand alone, give in, become one of us"; "Be middle of the road, why take chances?"; "Can't you give in just once?"; "Don't defy common standards." Wasn't all this as jocular then as it is now? Not even the Harvard Lampoon appreciated the bombast, naming it one of that year's worst. (Today that crowd would cheer, though perhaps in private they did back then, too; they may have been Tooheyed into public conformist reactions.) What's possible is that much of the audience simply didn't get Rand's diatribe-warning about the "world of the mob" and its rules that destroy creativeness, individuality. Coming out when it did, a few years after World War II, when the Communist scare was just about to explode, when the middle class was about to be tracted to death with suburban living, there was no tolerance for a movie advocating the virtues of self. Rand's Objectivism was then, and still is, anathema to religious and political demagoguery, because it loudly proclaims that the creative self is more important than the denial of self for the sake of others. It's Rand's simplicity -- not simple-mindedness -- that scares the money-grabbing celibates, pedophiles, phony evangelicals and corrupt politicians; without the continual suffering of others, they lose control. Admitting that this is a stretch, THE FOUNTAINHEAD is the precursor to the 1956 B-movie chiller INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Both warn about the dangers of Stepford Wifeism.
Rand was adamant her architect Howard Roark wasn't modeled after maverick Frank Lloyd Wright, but readers and viewers of THE FOUNTAINHEAD can't escape the similarities in that Roark's architectural style and his difficulties with the establishment parallel Wright's in so close a fashion that there's no way out of comparison. It was always a disservice to herself that she denied any linking, because what could she have lost had she said Wright's insistence on not compromising to "the drooling dolts" of sameness was a model? (Nothing; she would have gained.) Even capitalist ring-wingers and smartened-up liberals who might have otherwise been sympathetic to her philosophy, which is more American than her critics acknowledge (or are aware of), found themselves turned off by her denials. And surely when she wrote the screenplay, and saw the artists' concepts of Roark's architecture, which includes a ripoff of the masterpiece Fallingwater and an "Enwright" skyscraper, or listened to Gary Cooper closely approximating Wright's voice and its cadence, she had to recognize that she couldn't go on fooling anyone anymore. But none of this takes away from the sheer pleasure of the movie itself; in fact, it may help us enjoy it more.
An erotic madness swirls throughout THE FOUNTAINHEAD, and though the novel itself is a glory to macho sex -- rape as prelude to love, high-rises as phallic symbols -- the movie has the additional heat of a real-life affair between Gary Cooper as Roark and Patricia Neal as Dominique. Movies before this one have dealt with female submission to the penis in much the same way -- the heroine has to first pound on or claw at what she surrenders to. Here, there's something dangerous added to the mix: Neal's insatiable, pent-up desires must first be stoked by swacking Cooper's his face with a riding whip, urging him on to sexual assault, which no doubt she has been fantasizing about. Though these scenes are lifted from the book, they don't have the frenzy that Neal and Cooper bring to them. Coop's stoic impassiveness and Neal's arched, caustic instability comicly implode; while they're combusting with lust, we laugh at the high theatricality. But the carnality's real: when their fling ended, Neal was in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Postulating the male viewpoint of sex -- Dominique's more like a feminist male hustler than a frilly romantic -- Rand implicitly essays that women want to be raped before they can love; she even has Roark say -- it's in the book too -- "Pressure is a powerful factor, leading to consequences." The book doesn't have the mocking merriment that the movie flaunts: when Neal hears that line, we know that it's only a matter of minutes before she'll experience sex as the natural and in her case very much needed leveller.
Neal's appeal is limited; she's pre-hardened as most of her movies begin, so about all that's left to react to are the mind games her characters insist on playing. Her Kentucky accent suggests an imposing Tallulah, without the extension of satiric drawl, and she's far more attractive to look at. Her hyper hot ice demeanor is super charged -- she's a simmering defiant. In her finest hour, as Alma in Martin Ritt's HUD, there's a looseness -- her Texan-Sears catalog dresses seem to free her from the haute couture modulation she relied on as acting. But her dare is strongly catalytic, and Paul Newman's Hud, like Coop's Roark, is compelled to conquer. Unlike Dominique, who "loves" Roark not only for his sexual powers but also for the "greatness of (his) achievements," Alma has always known that Hud's no good; even if she coaxed on Hud's advances, his assault of her confirms the lowest estimate he has of her, and women in general. In THE FOUNTAINHEAD, she's archetypic, a pressure cooker, and -- hard to know if it's intended -- intensely likable; when she emotes, it's as if she's edged-out on one of those grass-induced contemplative, paranoiac highs during which the mind races while the body & face remain chicly immobile.
Gary Cooper wasn't much of an actor, though his granite stolidness was -- and may still be -- appealing because it seemed indestructible; there was no way he knew how to let us down us in the moral crunch. Seldom believable in anything he played because his monotone, his inflexible face never had any depth, he managed to move audiences anyway: his stiff curmudgeon in LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON taxes us yet we're delighted that his at-the-very-last-minute romantic sense takes charge so he can go after Audrey Hepburn. But Coop's pure Americanness is his reel virtue; he's the independent, sturdy God-like WASP who reassures audiences against corruption. (James Stewart and Henry Fonda define morality too, but as actors they once in a while could get mighty humanly riled up.) Defending himself in THE FOUNTAINHEAD-- having deliberated dynamited a project he designed after it was changed to meet mediocrity's demands -- Coop is the pinnacle of the stalwart, resolutely honing in on the blessings of the "creator" and the evils of the "parasite." A forgone conclusion that the shame he inflicts on a society mired in conformity will acquit him, it's still persuasive fifty years after Rand's novel first appeared.
Robert Douglas is incomparably snakey as Ellsworth M. Toohey, the "impractical intellectual" architecture critic for the yellow-streaked N.Y. Banner. The ultimate bourgeois, out to destroy originality that endangers the mainlining of the mediocre, with cigarette in filtered holder, penciled mustache, receding hair, Douglas's Toohey is the emblem of those wanting to control all others and rule the world in their own image. We've had the snobs-leeches before and since (George Sanders won an Oscar for his "Ratsputin" DeWitt in ALL ABOUT EVE) yet none personify the calculated viciousness we know exists in many of them in quite the way Douglas does; his Toohey might be Rand's updated perception of Brendan Gill going berserk on venomous afterthought in a N.Y. Reviews of Books piece about Joseph Campbell -- written after Campbell's death.
Rand's the original Libertarian -- the pontess of freedom advocating "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievements as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." That sounds a little like Republicanism before the fundamentalists took charge with their Contract on America, but even when the holier-than-thou fascists weren't in power, right-wing had the connotation that we must conform to a singular idea of what our democracy stands for: the rich get richer, while the rest become slaves. It's clear that Rand, through Roark, would rather suffer hardship before becoming another's lackey. She certainly wasn't a Democrat, because she railed against social welfare. But she knew labels themselves were restrictive and dangerous, that though labels were nebulous of real meaning, they were sold as having strict definitions, mostly dictates to subservience. Its original source less so, the movie THE FOUNTAINHEAD is impossible not to like because the crazy, wildly ludicrous elements that make it an expressionistic attack against social and spiritual peonage are more torchbearing than ever. Probably King Vidor didn't have the prescience in seeing it for what it would become: just about the most liberating bad movie ever made.
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