United States, 1949
Directed by King Vidor
With Gary Cooper (Howard Roark), Patricia Neal (Dominique Fracon), Raymond Massey (Gail Wynand), Kent Smith (Peter Keating), Robert Douglas (Ellsworth M. Toohey)
Architects are not known to feature often in fictions, unlike other creative minds, from musicians to painters and from writers to, well, filmmakers. Yet “The Fountainhead” is not really made to correct this neglect and to let the audience delve deep into the work of planning and building. Architecture is an art, but an art with the specific goal of making useful constructions: it is a creative effort purposefully serving collective needs. It can thus be cast as an ideal battleground pitting personal vision against social demands, the wish to stand out against the will to fit in, the integrity of the individual against the calculations of the society.
All the discourse, including his plea to the jury tasked to judge him after he blew up the housing project he secretly drawn, of lead character Howard Roark expresses, so clearly as to get tedious, so forcefully as to get hectoring, so self-righteous as to sound self-centered, what this battleground is and means and where one must stand amidst the furor – of course, precisely where he struggles on his own, against the odds and the others, proudly and stubbornly.
Stiff lip and stiff demeanor, steely eyes and steely will: Howard Roark would rarely depart from this image of a man first shot as a dark mass standing in the shadow on the frame’s left while the spotlight directed to the right hits an angry fellow disparaging his work and personality (although the last antagonist to gripe gives him a job – but this older and mercurial architect is then pictured as bankrupt and drunken, close to the end of his life, first evidence that giving favors to Howard Roark is tantamount to take a huge risk). Through the end he cuts a forbidding presence that could border on real heroism if his self-confidence was not such a blatant, outrageous show of arrogance born of being indeed alone against everyone and everything while feeling entitled and domineering. Rarely would the character feel somehow human, with weakness, doubts, tenderness.
The baggage aging actor Gary Cooper brings with him after a long, fruitful career replete with roles implying heroism, virility, fighting spirit, old-fashioned decency, in westerns primarily but also in war movies or capers, sustains the performance, makes the meeting of the actor and the part an obvious match that still looks as the narrative rambles on too perfect, too self-obvious, too much of a self-caricature. He is not quite mechanical but gets monolithic to a fault. Being self-assertive and self-reliant no longer emerge as a given constantly challenged, refined, and shaped to instill likewise feelings in the audience through the organic development of the film: it is a status either to accept or to put up with on the screen and outside.
Of course, many in his field are cast as pathetically unable to embrace this abrasive and absurd personality, mere silhouettes who agitate and bumble as naughty and narrow-minded players that are often shot sat, smug and smart, like a herd, the easy contrast to the hero of the battleground, shot isolated and often erect, or just rigid on the chair, the camera exploiting, celebrating, the lead actor’s build. Two characters among the hostile crowd of architects and bureaucrats unwilling to let the awkward creator have his way are given some import.
One is an old friend unsuccessfully arguing that Howard Roark plays by the rules, the nice but wimpish Peter Keating, who, because he asked him later, after his friend managed somehow to thrive, for help to be awarded the aforementioned housing project, eventually causes the great scandal and final clash determining Howard Roark’s destiny and triumph. The other is a haughty, snobbish, vicious art critic with many connections and scheming all day, Ellsworth M. Toohey, the story’s distinguished nemesis who is so eager to crush the career of Howard Roark. Repugnant he is, and effectively so, with his own and searing eloquence, but the trouble with the character is that his motivations are unclear – perhaps he just wanted to be publisher of the paper employing him as hinted in a scene, but even this sounds a narrative afterthought. He rather looks the needed spokesperson for the collective ethos that is just a threat to the hero and that is to be thoroughly denounced.
The decisive support for Howard Roark comes from another couple of characters, who are as individualistic and confrontational as he is. First an opportunistic adversary before becoming an admirer, who is actually admiring comparable ruthlessness, selfishness, and ambition in the architect, the snappy and tough Gail Wynand character is another fictional William Randolph Hearst, also haunted by childhood and keen on manipulating politics and the public. Through his narrative arc and his final defeat, the film also examines the power of the mass media, just to picture how masses are easy to influence, how much of a business news is anyway, how the individual can be endangered by this dubious aspect of modernity and democracy.
The other help is given by the only female character of the film and arguably the most toxic of the lot. First shot throwing a precious statue out of her apartment’s window, Dominique Fracon is both tormented and impregnable, moody and steely, repulsive and magnetic. She is deeply dissatisfied with the world she lives in and expects the decisive encounter, the miraculous incident, that could quell her agitation – in fact, she may be just waiting to find someone as unforgiving and intense as herself. Howard Roark could match her wild expectations but he is too eager to stay independent and perhaps too much of an irrepressible force, so she picks up Gail Wynand as a partner till the bitter end. But of course, it is the architect’s attraction that eventually prevails in a hyper-kinetic, hyper-spectacular final scene built around a lift, an endless skyscraper, a ravenous and exalted feminine face, a towering and bullying male face.
The trouble now, with the frantic and tense relation between Dominique Fracon and Howard Roark is how a raw and mad affair it is, bluntly exposed, casting hopelessly women as hysterical. Gross sexual symbolism associate them from the start – that drill Howard Roark holds as he is a worker sweating in a quarry the rich family of Dominique Fracon owns (what a nice coincidence) because he cannot have clients as an architect, that whip the equestrian girl enjoys using wickedly – and their developing intellectual affinities advertise ever more grossly the theoretical point of the film.
Adapting cleverly her eponymous novel – but she used to be a screenplay in the 1930s, Ayn Rand is offering more a vividly incarnated thesis than a truly dialectic and intelligent film. Laboring the point with those sets always over-the-top and bigger-than-life conveying the tension of the individual clashes and the awesome power of money and modernity and with those studied shot compositions built self-consciously around the silhouette and the stature of the lead actor, seasoned director King Vidor is for his part offering a stunning visual performance that fails to be a gripping masterpiece. This is not like a “Citizen Kane” (1941), but a brutal, if expressionist, energetic, admirably stark, illustration of brutal ideas.