The Fountainhead
King Vidor (1949)
The Fountainhead’s inclusion in this month’s BFI’s ‘Big Screen Classics’ slot prompts the question of what constitutes a classic. The dictionary definition that best confers such status on King Vidor’s film is ‘unusual example of its kind’: The Fountainhead, adapted by Ayn Rand from her best-selling novel of 1943, looks and sounds like no other mainstream Hollywood movie I can remember. Its protagonist Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) is a uniquely innovative architect, based on Frank Lloyd Wright (one of Rand’s heroes). His designs, by their unfettered originality, transform the conformist mediocrity of the New York City skyline but the examples of Roark’s work realised in Edward Carrere’s production designs for the movie are a sort of grandiose, futuristic kitsch. The physical scale of things is generally bizarre: as a review in Monthly Film Bulletin noted at the time of the picture’s original release, ‘hardly any scene takes place in a room less than a hundred yards long’. Much of the dialogue is dialectic: the characters trade more or less explicit assertions of the individualism that Ayn Rand promotes and the ‘collectivism’ she abhors. The chief mouthpiece for the forces of darkness is Ellsworth Toohey (Robert Douglas), hugely influential architecture critic for ‘The Banner’ newspaper. Rand intends the self-interested genius Roark to trounce his opponents’ arguments but she supplies stiffly rhetorical lines and, in effect, the same voice to all concerned. The visual and verbal novelty of The Fountainhead wears off quickly. The only entertaining clash of opposites that persists is between the inflexible dialogue and Max Steiner’s incongruous plushy score.
The dramatic climax to the film occurs through Roark’s allowing Peter Keating (Kent Smith), a compromising and therefore mediocre architect, to claim the creative credit for a huge housing project which Roark will himself design. I didn’t get why the proudly egocentric Roark would agree to such an arrangement, even with the condition he imposes – that Keating build the development precisely according to Roark’s specifications. Keating inevitably caves in to pressure to alter the original designs so Roark rigs explosives to the newly erected buildings, blows them up and goes on trial. He conducts his own defence, calls no witnesses but makes a speech to the jury, defending his right to operate as an independent agent without obligations to (there-is-no-such-thing-as) society. It’s not clear what crime Roark is being tried for but, since he appears to have no qualms admitting that he dynamited ‘his’ development, you’d have thought he’d plead guilty. Except, of course, that he believes he hasn’t done anything wrong. The jury, who compel admiration by staying awake through his summation, must admit that Roark is right and he’s acquitted. You might think the verdict of a jury – as the expression of a collective point of view – would take the shine off this triumph but you’d be wrong. In the light of the public vindication of Roark, the vanquished Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey), owner and publisher of ‘The Banner’, presents him with a contract to design, carte blanche, a building that will bear Wynand’s name. As soon as Roark has left his office, Wynand takes a gun from his desk drawer and commits suicide. This leaves his widow Dominique (Patricia Neal) free to marry Roark: they had an affair earlier in the story – after Dominique had broken off her engagement to loser Keating, before she married Wynand. In the film’s final scene, Dominique, who also helped Roark blow up the blighted project, ascends in an open elevator to the top of the new Wynand Building. The Übermensch hero Howard Roark stands proudly at the summit, unwavering in the wind that gusts about the most phallic skyscraper the world has ever seen.
Just as Roark permits no tinkering with the plans he supplies to Peter Keating, so Ayn Rand stipulated that no changes could be made to her script for The Fountainhead. In his introduction to this BFI screening, Matthew Harle, a postdoctoral researcher at the Barbican Centre & Guildhall, claimed that Rand was so determined to guard against Keating-esque dilution of her words that she personally supervised the shooting of the film, and virtually co-directed it. Harle suggested that, as a result, King Vidor was as ‘absent from’ the finished work as Rand was ‘present in it’. This confirmed my increasing feeling, as I watched The Fountainhead, that what went on behind the camera was more interesting than what ended up on the screen. Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal had an off-screen affair: you wouldn’t guess it from the florid yet soulless quality of Roark and Dominique’s liaison. Howard Roark is a winner and Cooper easily takes the prize for most boring and pompous performance in the movie (with Raymond Massey a distant second). Matthew Harle got off to an amusing start by noting how well represented architects are as a professional group in latterday romantic comedies – Sleepless in Seattle, Love Actually and It’s Complicated among them. He went on to characterise The Fountainhead as a romcom sui generis, with Howard Roark his own love interest.
Towards the end of his introduction – one of the most cogent and enjoyable I’ve ever heard at BFI – Harle mentioned Donald Trump, as both ‘another builder of New York skyscrapers’ and a fan of Ayn Rand’s novel: in an interview in December 2016, the then president-elect told USA Today that the work ‘relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything’. Harle closed with a question he admitted he couldn’t answer: what it does mean for a twenty-first century audience to watch The Fountainhead when Donald Trump is the leader of the Western world? For this viewer, I think it meant I wasn’t in the mood to find the film extravagantly but irresistibly ridiculous – or, to put it more simply, a laugh. Soon after seeing The Fountainhead, I caught up with Emily Nussbaum’s brilliant New Yorker article ‘How Jokes Won the Election’ (23 January 2017)[1]. Nussbaum’s piece makes it all the harder just now to see the funny side of OTT individualism.
1 February 2017
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/how-jokes-won-the-election