The Fountainhead Rages Against the Dying of the Might
The 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel admires the iconoclasm, expulsion, and ascendency of architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper). A “fool visionary” raging against the bland stylizations of contemporary architecture, Roark refuses to churn out designs that employ well worn tropes. As a result, he suffers greatly: even after an early success, other work is scarce, and when he does win a project, the customers propose tacky modifications to his design, forcing him to withdraw from the project entirely. No matter, for his artistic inspiration and integrity are what matter above all else.
After fending off economic realities as long as he can, Roark is eventually forced to labor in a quarry where he catches the eye of Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal). Francon is a journalist for The New York Banner—the petulant, controversy-loving rag owned by Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey)—who, despite the infamous reputation of her employer, bears her own form of integrity that demands beauty from the world even as it strikes fear in her. Neal briefly appears earlier, but the quarry sequence where she first meets Roark is when she really enters the film with a downright gravitational pull. Her melodramatic gestures and excellent costuming (stark onyx robes that make the rest of the black and white imagery seem sepia toned) gives her the appearance of a chic vampire, and she is undoubtedly lustful for the life force of greatness. Neal revels in these scenes as though she’s the Wicked Witch of the Northeast.
To Francon’s delight and Wynand’s ire, Roark’s time in exile doesn’t last forever, and the world begins to see the majesty of his work. Still clients want to modify his designs, but Roark rebukes them at every turn. Years later, Roark confronts one last challenge that threatens to undo him: an onslaught of bad press from every paper in town, including The Banner, leading to his eventual trial related to the destruction of a building project.
The script, penned by Ayn Rand herself, thrusts the viewer into its didacticism. The credits have barely faded from the screen before we hear Roark being chastised: “There’s no place for originality in architecture.” It will culminate in Cooper praising “the unsacrificed self,” lauding the supremacy of “the creator” who acts with individuality while categorizing just about everyone else as parasitical. It’s a heavy, blunt script fixated on the bare structure of character and ideas. Like an in-progress skyscraper, there’s an odd, impressive quality recognized in the bones; but it’s not a thing to be lived in, not ready for any real human purpose. Though I am engaging with the film and not the tome of the novel, Rand’s act of screenwriting gives justification for assuming that the film’s ideas are fitting and representative of her ideas. The Fountainhead envisions all social interactions as competitions whose forms are not friendship or love or compassion or encouragement but submission, corruption, manipulation. Even integrity is seen primarily as a method of domination: to have integrity is to be above other people—a bizarre reworking of integrity opposed to any definition I’m familiar with.
The Fountainhead threatens to be only this concrete pedagogy; thankfully, Vidor’s skill makes it something more. The monochromatic imagery, pulling from noir sensibilities, brings a sharp lushness to the film’s world. Vidor makes interesting use of the architectural background: a scene where Roark sketches a new design for Wynand is an exemplar of style and performance. We hardly, if ever, see a window that isn’t framing some distant skyscraper or looking down on the machinations of the city, creating a motif that builds a sense of verticality and movement. The players—Cooper, Neal, Massey, and Robert Douglas as newspaperman Elsworth Toohey—lean into the caricatured roles, finding delicious verve within lumpy lines. And Vidor’s blocking consistently elevates the script’s material to generate something more engaging.
On one hand, it’s easy to see how Rand’s outlook allured many. Watered down, her philosophizing isn’t a terribly giant step away from commonplace paeans to individual uniqueness. Don’t let others tell you how to live. Escape from the crowd. Be creative. After all, “every idea comes from the mind of one man.” The issue, however, becomes clear when confronted with the undiluted form. The emphasis in that quote is on the word “one,” contrasted against the many. Even when Roark takes on a project to design housing for the impoverished, he insists that he’s doing it because he “love[s] the doing, not the people.” So the script self-reflexively turns the act (of kindness) into an object (rather, an idolatry).
Along the way, oddities and false dichotomies abound. When he’s in financial need, Roark refuses support from a friend. But is a refusal to accept help noble? When integrity is foisted against submission, it becomes an odd corollary to domination. Roark’s climactic speech at the trial contrasts the figure of the creator with the parasite, thereby equating the public with an invasive species—but these are not equivalent terms. Indeed, The Fountainhead perceives society as totalitarian in its very essence. When these aphorisms are taken to their logical result, the outlook becomes atrocious (as in, sharing a root with atrocity).
With this in mind, the visual comparison to noir is, perhaps, a fitting one. Seen from one view, The Fountainhead is not too far off from The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, except that the search here is for man’s creative greatness, a treasure lost amid the labyrinth of mediocrity imposed on individuals. Like The Maltese Falcon, though, we come to find that the search is meaningless, the treasure nothing but a facsimile. So, too, is the world of The Fountainhead filled with as much untruth as the world that Marlowe wanders through in Howard Hawk’s byzantine masterpiece.
A few days before watching King Vidor’s The Fountainhead, I claimed that a film with a strong point that I disagreed with is nearly always more interesting than a film that vacillates instead of making any point. This, then, gives me a means of appreciation—and refutation—of The Fountainhead. It is an impressive work of filmmaking built upon a shoddy foundation. A film whose vitality and beauty doesn’t strain against but makes bedfellows with its poisonous ideas. When it comes down to it, Howard Roark is nothing except an economic ubermensch. Raskolnikov, if he were an innate capitalist. Suitably, the last image is of him alone, shot from below. Triumphant? Maybe. But alone.
