King Vidor's (1894-1982)

T H E F O U N T A I N H E A D

(1949)

Starring Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Robert Douglas, Kent Smith, Henry Hull, Ray Collins, and Morris Ankrum

Screenplay by Ayn Rand from her novel

Music by Max Steiner

Photographed by Robert Burks

Art Direction by Edward Carrere

Matte paintings by Chesley Bonestell

Produced for Warner Brothers by Henry Blanke

Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead was published in 1942 to indifferent reviews and slow sales. The New York Times gave nearly the only favorable review. Like her first novel, the semi-autobiographical We the Living, The Fountainhead seemed destined for obscurity. However, reader word-of-mouth was favorable enough to make the book a runaway best-seller by the end of World War II. It was especially popular with servicemen, and since coming out in paperback has sold over 20 million copies.

Ayn Rand was born in Russia in 1905 and emigrated to the United States in 1926. After working a variety of jobs in Hollywood, she wrote the courtroom drama Night of January 16th in 1934, which was successfully produced on Broadway. Paramount produced a bowdlerized film version in 1941. Rand published We the Living in 1936, telling first-hand of life in Soviet Russia. This highly accomplished and philosophically less-ambitious first novel fell into immediate obscurity but is much better regarded today. Intellectuals of the time were not receptive to anything which challenged their prevailing world view that socialism was the wave of the future.

Warner Brothers made The Fountainhead a few years after 20th Century Fox achieved great success filming The Razor's Edge (1946) from the novel by W. Somerset Maugham starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney. King Vidor was one of the most established film directors of the time, famous for a string of landmark films, including The Big Parade (1925) for MGM and Duel in the Sun (1946) for David O. Selznick. He later directed War and Peace (1955) for Paramount starring Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn and filmed in VistaVision, and the ill-starred Solomon and Sheba (1959) for United Artists, notable for being produced by co-star Gina Lolabrigida, the death of Tyrone Power, replaced in mid-filming by Yul Brynner, and for being the first live-action film produced in Super Technirama 70.

Vidor introduces architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) and establishes his relationship with Peter Keating (Kent Smith) and his mentor Henry Cameron (Henry Hull) in an outstanding montage which seems to have been inspired by the introduction to Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). These two montages get the audience deeply into the story right away and are among the finest moments in any American films. Roark's career reaches an impasse, as clients reject his modern designs, and he temporarily closes his office rather than take handouts from Keating. Then the story switches gears to introduce newspaper publisher Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey) and architecture critics Ellsworth Monkton Toohey (Robert Douglas) and Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal). Dominique is bored with work, with life, with everything, and retires to her father's country home. There she encounters Roark, who is working in a local quarry. He rejects her after some preliminary flirtation, but then rapes her in her bedroom.

The rape scene in the novel is ambiguous, but was graphic by prevailing literary standards, and greatly contributed to the book's popularity. Vidor represents the rape as unambiguously a rape, so the scene in the film remains disturbing and problematic. It is clear that Dominique resists Roark physically, but does not call out to alert her servants, and does not subsequently attempt to prosecute Roark, whom she loves. Not presenting the rape scene as actual rape would probably have left audiences feeling cheated.

Roark is called away to design his first major commission, abandoning Dominique. Toohey attacks the design in his column, but recognizing its aesthetic merit, Dominique champions the architect and his building without knowing he is the man she loves. Howard and Dominique meet at the grand opening, but do not reconcile. Rejected by Roark, Dominique agrees to marry Wynand. Wynand hires Roark to build them a county house. Although Dominique is uncomfortable living with one man in a house designed by the one she really loves, she has to conceal her feelings for Roark from Wynand.

Roark designs a large scale housing project and puts Peter Keating's name on the work to make it more acceptable to a committee. He stipulates that no changes can be made to the design. The committee violates its agreement with Keating, and Roark responds by dynamiting the compromised design. His criminal trial is the climax of the story.

Featuring splashy post-war modern sets and numerous matte paintings of Roark's buildings, The Fountainhead visualizes a strangely familiar world, largely inspired by the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. Celebrated astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell contributed the matte paintings, which he had also done for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). His astronomical art became a part of the public consciousness of the 1950s, and he also provided matte paintings for George Pal's famous science fiction films: Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), and The Conquest of Space (1955).

Max Steiner was the dean of Hollywood composers from the beginning of the sound era until his death in 1971. At RKO he scored King Kong (1933) with distinctive and recurrent Wagnerian lietmotivs, and orchestrated most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals. At Warner Brothers he scored Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) and a series of extravagant tear-jerkers with Bette Davis, including Jezebel (1938 - purportedly Davis's consolation for not getting to play Scarlet O'Hara in Gone with the Wind), Dark Victory and The Old Maid (both 1939), and Now, Voyager (1942), to the extent that the distinctive Steiner sound is strongly associated with Davis. He also composed the familiar music for Gone with the Wind (1939) for David O. Selznick, which remains his best-known work. He scored the landmark film noir The Big Sleep (1946) and John Houston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre starring Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Houston (John's father), Houston's Key Largo starring Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, and Lionel Barrymore, and Jean Negulesco's Johnny Belinda starring Jane Wyman (all 1948). In 1949, the year he scored The Fountainhead, he also scored Fritz Lang's landmark film noir The Big Heat starring James Cagney. Afterward he wrote the music for Stanley Kramer's The Cain Mutiny (1954) for Columbia starring Humphrey Bogart, and John Ford's The Searchers (1956) starring John Wayne.

Because of her bad experience with her play Night of January 16th, where she signed away subsidiary rights and saw Paramount produce an unauthorized and garbled film version, Rand was insistent that she write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, and that the final version be edited with no cuts. Although Vidor wanted to significantly edit a six-minute courtroom speech made by Roark at the end, Rand prevailed, and one of the longest speeches in a feature film does not seem noticeably long. Vidor was a veteran of such conflicts. On his most recent film, Duel in the Sun, at that time the most expensive film ever produced in Hollywood, he sparred so constantly with micromanaging producer David O. Selznick, that when star Jennifer Jones, who was also Mrs. Selznick, was told "the war was over" -- a reference to the end of World War II -- she thought it meant her director and her husband had stopped fighting.

Stars Gary Cooper (1901-1961) and Patricia Neal (1926-) engaged in a passionate affair which seemed to enhance their screen chemistry. The publicity contributed to the film's box office, but it was not the success Warner Brothers looked for. Rand always considered Cooper the most heroic of American film personalities and frequently told acquaintances he would play the hero if The Fountainhead were ever filmed. Humphrey Bogart was also considered for the part, and his more rebellious outsider persona might have made him a better choice, especially if paired with Lauren Bacall. Neal is especially famous for her performance in Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952). In 1953, she married British writer Roald Dahl, author of James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She suffered three burst cerebral aneurisms while pregnant in 1965 putting her in a coma for three weeks. She gave birth to a healthy daughter Lucy later that year. Dahl supervised her rehabilitation, during which she had to relearn to walk and speak. The Dahls divorced in 1983.

Raymond Massey (1896-1983) gives a moving performance as the fatally-flawed Gail Wynand. Massey starred in William Cameron Menzies' film of H.G. Wells' Things to Come (1936) and was nominated for the best actor Oscar for Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). A Canadian, he served in the Canadian armed forces in both world wars and became a U.S. citizen shortly before he made The Fountainhead. He only portrayed a Canadian once, in Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941). His father owned farm machinery manufacturer Massey Ferguson.

The Fountainhead, however, completely belongs to Robert Douglas (1909-1999). It is absolutely his finest performance, and probably his largest role, in any film. An intelligent and effortlessly urbane character actor with a resonant and cultivated voice, he enjoyed no great range and was often cast as the villain, as in Selznick's second Prisoner of Zenda and Ivanhoe (both directed by Richard Thorpe in 1952). In each of these films, he was only the second villain, backing up James Mason and George Sanders respectively. He enjoyed a second career as a highly successful producer-director, and continued to act occasionally. The character of Ellsworth Monckton Toohey was modeled by Rand on socialist political scientist Harold Laski (1893-1950), author of The American Presidency (1940), Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1943), and The American Democracy (1948).

Kent Smith (1907-1985) gives a good performance as the pathetic Peter Keating, but is probably too likable to really do the character justice. He gave excellent performances in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946). Henry Hull (1890-1977), who plays Roark's mentor Henry Cameron, played The Werewolf of London (1935) and Prudent the arms manufacturer in Master of the World (1961) with Vincent Price. Ray Collins (1889-1965), who plays entrepreneur Roger Enright, was one of Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, and has major supporting roles in Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and Touch of Evil (1958). He appeared on television for years being cross-examined by Raymond Burr as Police Lt Tragg on "Perry Mason."

Veteran character actor Morris Ankrum (1896-1964) plays the prosecutor in the climactic trial. His real name was Nussbaum, and received his law degree from the University of Southern California and taught economics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was an associate professor. He founded the Pasadena Playhouse Theater Arts School where his students included Robert Preston and Raymond Burr. A contract with Paramount led to roles as the villain in a long string of westerns throughout the 1930s. Later on, he often played doctors as in Kurt Neumann's Kronos (1957), lawyers as in The Fountainhead, scientists as in Rocketship XM (1950), or other professionals, but he became typecast as a general in the 1950s. He played a colonel in William Cameron Menzies' Invasion from Mars (1953) and generals in Vera Cruz (1954) with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, as well as the first film in Superscope, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), The Giant Claw, Beginning of the End (both 1957), and From the Earth to the Moon (1958) as U.S. Grant, no less. He played an admiral in The Eternal Sea (1955) and the secretary of defense in Red Planet Mars (1952). He often played the judge on "Perry Mason" with his student Raymond Burr.