Fountainhead (1949)

Editor's Note Long treasured as a masterpiece of camp, THE FOUNTAINHEAD stars Gary Cooper as architect Howard Roark. A paragon of integrity, he refuses to create buildings that violate his sense of aesthetic value, choosing instead to work as laborer until he can find funding for his own projects. He becomes involved with wealthy Dominique (Patricia Neal), a woman who combines sexual aggressiveness with an abiding belief that a woman must be subdued in order to love. Roark accepts a commission to build a public-housing project provided that no changes be made to his radical design. When a team of architects is employed to humanize his work, the enraged architect blows up the entire complex. He's placed on trial and is forced to defend the extremity of his action. One of the most unusual artifacts ever to emerge from Hollywood, Ayn Rand's adaptation of her novel is a contradictory hodgepodge of sub-Nietzschean musing, so laden with wooden rhetoric and hysterical ranting that it could never be mistaken for any speech ever uttered on this planet. The bizarre miscasting of Cooper as an arrogant Ubermann and Patricia Neal as a mildly sadomasochistic intellectual only add to the fun. In the legendary scene in which Dominique watches Roark pound his pneumatic drill into the quarry rockface, there's no mistaking the beatific look on her face for intellectual excitement.

	Gary Cooper
	Paul Harvey
	Henry Hull
	Thurston Hall
	Robert Douglas
	Kent Smith
	Raymond Massey
	Jerome Cowan
	Patricia Neal
	Moroni Olsen
	Harry Woods
	Ray Collins
	Edward Carrere - Production Designer
	Max Steiner - Composer
	David Weisbart - Editor
	Robert Burks - Director of Photography
	Ayn Rand - Screenwriter
	Henry Blanke - Producer
	King Vidor - Director

THE FOUNTAINHEAD is a cinema monolith based on Rand's 1943 monolithic tome about an idealistic architectural genius who battles with his corporate sponsors over the designs for a housing project. When he learns that the plans were changed over his objections, he destroys the finished building and is forced to defend his unyielding position in court. Entertainment Weekly
"[I]t's a radiant fever dream with striking set design and an erotic undertow..." -- Grade: B 11/17/2006 p.107