King Vidor, The Fountainhead, 1949
I actually expected to like this far less than I did, but found it curiously absorbing and visually impressive, with great sets and surprisingly good filming. Of course, as screenplays go, it's a veritable train wreck, with Ayn Rand adapting her own 1000-page novel (which I haven't read, nor will I) into indigestible nonsense spouted by actors who, for the most part, either overact horribly or give the impression they don't understand what they're saying. Worst of all is Gary Cooper, whose final courtroom speech should be the rousing apotheosis of Rand's egotistical "philosophy", but which he delivers so flatly you wonder why one earth the director let it pass. I read somewhere that Rand wanted Cooper to play her idealistic architect Howard Roark because she had some kind of crush on him herself (and Rand's own sexual frustrations eventually fucked up her own life), but it wasn't exactly inspired casting. That said, I wonder else who could have played Roark in his place. Cooper's own real-life heartthrob Patricia Neal is awesome as the weird, self-destructive Dominique, but you'd never guess they were lovers offscreen from watching this - compare Bogie and Bacall, for example, where the sex practically oozes off the celluloid. Amazingly, Rand managed to make both the hero and the leading lady versions of herself. Quite an achievement. And, given her subsequent strange influence over folks like Alan Greenspan (Adam Curtis's All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace is well worth having a look at in this respect), the film has a curious resonance in our own, fucked-up Trump times. For "Wynand Building" read "Trump Tower".
Meanwhile, I can't resist quoting (in full) one of the many user reviews over at IMDb:
"One of the biggest mistakes in film history was allowing Ayn Rand to write the screenplay adaptation for her own novel. Boy does she like to hear herself talk or what? There is not one line of dialogue in this film that isn't overly dramatic and patently didactic. Rand does for dialogue what Norma Desmond does for mannerisms, except in the case of Norma Desmond there's an excuse -- she's nuts. Rand as a screenwriter just comes off as an egomaniac and she proves it with every over-stretched word. Even Hamlet would have told her to shut up.
Rand somehow manages to make Gary Cooper and Patricia Neil totally unlikeable in their respective roles. The whole thing is a handbook for art-deco dialogue as a dying language. Okay, Howard won't compromise his art and Dominique is a tortured chick -- we get it already, lady. Massey's newspaper mogul character, on the other hand, is great and he plays with the fecund dialogue like a little boy plays with a puppy. Too bad he's in the wrong movie.
I now have a new nightmare. I'm dead and I run into Ayn Rand at a celestial cocktail party. She corners me in a conversation and, oh my god, she sounds just like this movie."
), a film crew who are on strike because there's no food provided, and a small group of insane territorial army soldiers who are convinced Saddam Hussein is already in the vicinity. Utterly potty, echt Moullet. Loved it.
Thanks, Michael. I'm a big Wellman fan, looking fwd to this
