Whoever did the set/production design for this move did an amazing job. They could’ve made it as an actual architect. Roark’s building still looks like it could be cutting-edge modern architecture in 2024.
Dominique's utter shock down to her shoes when she realizes who Roark actually is is fantastic; which, of course, is precisely what Roark wanted. Knowing that she would be present that evening is the only reason he attended.
Patricia Neal's trademarks: Showing shock and scorn. I don't think the filmmakers realized this at the time - but there's not one light moment in this film, or any lightheartedness to be found. Just this relentless and tremendous weight of Rand ideas. Which are great ideas, to be sure - but in this movie - are delivered with a sledgehammer. Rand had worked on the script. But even she distanced herself from this solid-wooden production after seeing the completed picture. Movies with the heaviest of ideas still need a little air to breathe - but you won't find any in this one. Still, the film has some fine moments - and is worth a look for anyone who read, and liked, the book.
I marvel at the scene where Dominique Francon descends down those sumptuous stairway, the interiors is as seductive as Patricia Neal herself and then Gary Cooper's statuesque elegance like his architecture.... absolutely classic!
I don't mind his age, though Gary Cooper isn't the guy I'd choose for the part. The movie builds on Roark's years in the wilderness, working quarries and designing gas stations. Being an idealist means more when you've already paid a cost for it.
@dynmicpara2 - Actually the term actor is slowly evolving to encompass both sexes. Another twenty years, and the term actress might be dropped altogether. I wonder myself how that might play out at future award ceremonies. Best Actor In A Female Lead? Who knows...
I still use actress as well as waitress because I think female forms of words are equal to male forms. Calling women actors is just a result of more regressive gender science confusion and denial.
I didn't see anything wrong in this film to deserve all these critics... Gary Cooper too old for the role he plays...?????? He doesn't look old for the role and Ms. Francon doesn't look like a sprig chicken either and I firmly believe it is a hell of a good film regardless of its critics...!!!!!!
Zack Snyder wants to make a Fountainhead movie (he hasn't because he can't get the rights to it) and the only good thing I think of it is that maybe Henry Cavil could be Howard Roark, and maybe ScarJo could be Dominique?
I would truly appreciate it very much if someone out there could upload this American Classic film so that more people from all over the world could appreciate this....
The highest tribute to Ayn Rand, is that her critics must distort everything she stood for in order to attack her. She advocated reason, not force; the individual’s rights to freedom of action, speech, and association; self-responsibility, NOT self-indulgence; and a live-and-let-live society in which each individual is treated as an END, not the MEANS of others’ ends. How many critics would dare honestly state these ideas and say, ” . . .and that’s what I reject”?
@@okramando FALSE. She died in her own department and not a care home it is true, but she was far from alone. Neither was she dependent on welfare. She received a steady income from her writing - all four of her novels remain best sellers and are regarded as classics of American literature being promoted as such by her renowned publishers, Penguin. As for the baseless charge that she rejected social welfare - that too is false. She rejected state welfare due to its reliance on force but reclaiming, in part, that which has been illegitimately stolen from you, does not constitute a support for larceny. Indeed, she expressly encouraged claiming state benefits precisely on the grounds that all such claims could constitute only a partial recovery of one's stolen assets. It is worth noting too that her estate is still paying taxes more than 40 years after her death.
I love the look Dominique casts at Toohey at 1:05. She doesn't even need to hear the rest of his establishing character moment, she just gives him the pitying/contemptuous up-and-down look to confirm the jealousy, mediocrity and unjustified self-importance she detected from his first sentence and dismisses him from her world.
In 1962 I read the book 'The Fountainhead'. Ann Rand gave a lecture at Ford Hall Forum next to Northeastern University about that time. "Don't believe anything you hear and half of what you see." I had worked for Harvard School of Design after leaving Tufts bored. The person who built WTC/911 said his structural engineering did not compensate for a fuel laden plane hitting a building. I worked in architecture and engineering all over he world and made the most money working for Field Facility Engineers building telecommunications systems. I am responsible for construction of 400 apartments in Boston. I believe she was trying to convince people they should be doing their best for humanity and not profit. If she was poor it was the way we all end up in some manner. I met a person of extreme wealth in Newport, RI. and wouldn't change places. I live in D/R and there are many unoccupied buildings that could provide housing for people that need to get out of hostile environments. The banks and bureaucracy have screwed everyone everywhere. The movie is what is. About being poor James Whistler "Whistler Mother painting" fought to his death for freedom of expression and died in poverty. His paintings today get????$$$???
As a classic movie enthusiast, Gary Cooper's "The Fountainhead" from 1949 is by far one of the finest classic movies besides Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce" from 1945.
A great example of how films cannot help but age, usually badly, but a book can be timeless. The Fountainhead might have been written yesterday, but this film is very much constrained by the time in which it was made.
This movie is a crystalline distillation of the novel. It exists apart from while at the same time immortalizing the philosophy of Rand. To remake it would be a slap in the face.
Peter Keating looks too confident. I always imagined him uptight and anxious. Because he knew perfectly what he was. But then again, this was during his prime years, and he wanted to believe the delusion of his success. And Jesus, Howard Roark looks too old in this! I always imagined him young and vigorous, because on how much he loves his work.
People complain about the stilted dialogue, but Ayn Rand's script wasn't trying for realism. She deliberately used melodramatic characters to push her objectivist philosophy. The song _Puttin' On the Ritz_ contains the line "Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper". This scene illustrates just how sharp Cooper looked in a tuxedo.
@@allanfifield8256 Kirk Douglas dropped a screenwriter from the "Spartacus" production because the characters in his hands became "speeches on legs". That seems to have been how Rand wanted it in " The Fountainhead".
I would have liked to see The Temple of the Human Spirit(and the statue) in the movie. It was probably too controversial a subject to have been incorporated into the theme.
'-- a sense of joy... the kind that makes one feel as if it were an achievement to experience it.' There are those peak moments in Ayn Rand's writing that bring feelings like you have just been to Atlantis or something, Those out of this world experience one feels after she had bombarded you with 'universal truths' and had reached that rational plane of 'objectivity' and then ask you to look back from your steps of not knowing. It's kind of ironic that such a thing is more of a possibility of fiction (of absolutes) and must have been hard to re-create in a world driven by scarcity and influences.
"Those out of this world experience one feels after she had bombarded you with 'universal truths' and had reached that rational plane of 'objectivity' and then ask you to look back from your steps of not knowing." Very well put! I suggest you write more, if you aren't already.
I’m reading the book for a second time right now, and really enjoying it. It is funny that the actors and actresses cast in this movie do not resemble what I envisioned in my minds eye. I imagine her as dark and Mediterranean looking and he’s supposed to be much younger, wiry with somewhat crazy orange hair. Also, their mannerisms are...well, off. Rand’s Roark would never make a slight “face” to her sort of saying “this is awkward “ or whatever that was. They are both way too cool and sexy for that, IMO. Would love to see a remake.
This film is very surreal. It feels like a feature-length episode of "THE TWILIGHT ZONE". The dialogue also feels like STEVE DITKO wrote it. He's a disciple of the author's ideas.
Bullies sometimes help us. The owner of the gossip newspaper hired Roark! . LOL it is a small world & we do meet some strange people in this life. Who can control love between people? and Roark is so forgiving when the rich man marries Roark's girlfriend. If an architect blows up a building in 2016 then he would be declared guilty & put to jail. I have met a woman that doesn't want to express love. She is sad. I am becoming like Roark in the silence factor. I too need to put my life in gear by taking action instead of talking. Hmm.. I'm not achieving my gigantic goals yet, but I am using my time wisely since I spend it babysitting.
Ayn Rand thought Gary Cooper too old to play ROARK and Patricia Neal too young to play Dominque Francon. Neal had an affair with Cooper and got pregnant by him. He compelled her to abort their love child. That said, this 1949 movie is still compelling.
"Compelled"? Do you mean "pressured"? Or perhaps "supported"? Let's be careful with the language. I doubt force or threat was used to get her to have an abortion. Also, he could have avoided a scandal had he just paid for her to take a "vacation" for a few months.
That staircase is an accident waiting to happen. You'd sure put in a day's hard climbing living in a place like that. Evidently the apartment was designed for mountaineers and Sherpas, not ordinary people. Can you imagine lugging cleaning supplies up and down all day long? Can you imagine doing any daily chore up and down those stairs all day long?
They were trying to show an elegent modern design, engineered with style. But the scene was to show that the architect may not have liked the design, but he was more than happy to steal the brilliance of the engineering.
Every single person in this movie is miscast. Every one. Read the book instead. At east Rand wasn't quite as full of herself in Fountainhead as she would be with Atlas Shrugged.
@@denisenoemyschizotypaldiso3755 Because 22-y.o. "geniuses" like Roark, fresh out of school and outspoken to the point of abrasiveness, always get immediate traction in an industry where millions of dollars and thousands of human lives depend upon their outlandish building ideas actually working. It was AYN RAND who knew nothing of real life.
The picture had to be sexed-up to give it more of a chance at the box-office, hence the scenes of Dominique on horseback, galloping around frenetically and whipping Roark across the face. In the doorstop novel, this took-up just a handful of lines.
1:16 the Ellsworth actor seems miscast; he's way too assertive and masculine here. The book describes him as a chicken-like weakling with a scrawny neck and a soothing voice. 1:37 Similarly, Guy Francon here resembles some kind of military general. In the book he's a metrosexual dandy. 2:47 The Dominque Francon actress nailed it here; the book describes her as having "empty eyes, staring past and through Howard"
Did women age faster in the 1940's, perhaps because of the smoking and the alcohol consumption? Patricia Neal looks more like 30 than her calendar age of 23 when she made this movie.
If The Fountainhead were remade today, I picture Dominique Francon as portrayed by Krysten Ritter(Jane from Breaking Bad) Seems she would be perfect attitude and all.
That's the error: Rand wasn't writing characters as such. She was using them as vehicles, as archetypes for ideas. It's a real unique way to convey things, and very deep. Personally, I love the way it makes things off-kilter and gives them a formal weirdness. Once you get how she's using the characters, it takes on a whole different dimension. They're not meant to be real people!
That is a good observation. Her books are like Plato's Republic. A set of dialogs and monologs that express social and individual philosophy....the settings are just contrived parables to hold the lessons together. The character go from how do you do, to baring their deepest thoughts in 10 seconds.
2:28 -- "A man with an Idea! I MUST have him!" 3:45: Possibly the lamest, most bloated dialogue in Hollywood, with competition only from several other points in this very film. No wonder Rand was laughed out of the screenwriting community.
0:58 Goes to show how myopic Ayn's vision was. It makes perfect sense for an architect to ask for the opinion of the public for his creation. He hasn't built an artwork, but rather a space for people to occupy. So asking the user for their opinion makes perfect sense. Taking the user into consideration was what made Apple a giant, after all.
@@jupiterlegrand4817 Nope. Architecture isn't simply artistic expression the way that stand-up comedy or cinema are. Architecture is a combination of art and functionality. My father, having grown up in an Indian village, still brushes his teeth in the bathroom while in a squatted position. Tell me-would it hurt the 'genius' of an architect to build a flat which takes into consideration his personal quirk? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you live in a homogenized Western country and act almost exactly like your neighbours-this homogeneity in turn has led you to blindly believe the blatant one-sidedness of Rand's thesis.
If you want the architect to build YOUR design, why hire an expensive architect known for his original designs? Waste of money. If I were building a custom home, I wouldn't hire an architect and then show him a design I picked out of a book of plans. I'd tell him the home must have 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, open plan kitchen and to make the best of the site's views. How he does it is up to him. Presumably, I'd have hired him because I'd seen his work and liked it.
Well, no. This was a private commission done for a private client. And that’s the point therein. Why should Roark or Enright care about other opinions?
Gary Cooper was 48 when this film was made. The book started with Howard Roark as 22 and ended with him in his early 30s. The age is the main reason Cooper just doesn't make a credible Roark.
@@keimo2007 I love the book. I like the movie. But the film would have been better with a younger Howard Roark. It also need to be in color so his red hair would show.
Dig the current code violations, particularly the stairs and balcony without rails...Yikes if only we had such freedom these days. I bet the glass is single paned and not laminated. "OHHH the humanity..." Tongue fully in Cheek! eww...I forgot the energy code, I bet every damn lamp is incandescent, they don't show the entry, but I bet it it's not accessible. God, It is virtually impossible to practice Architecture anymore...
The director knew they had about 159 pages of tendentious dialogue to get through each shooting day, and every day costs money. So, the actors had to speed up the delivery (except Cooper -- he just couldn't). Sloppy screenwriters, esp. those who are adapting their own books, try to throw in as much of the source material as they can. Look at the TV show "Gilmore Girls" if you want a flood of dialogue, delivered fast. It's like they sped up the tape by 25%.
HOW DARE you say that to a uncompromising hyper-masculine creative genius entrepreneur who doesn't care a fig for the "opinions" of a jaded and pultrescent society long compromised by the false allure of "public goods" and alleged "community values" like me?
I watched this the other night. It was painful start to finish. Rand wrote the screenplay herself and would not allow any changes leading to scene after scene awful dialog. Made Gary Cooper look foolish as an actor. Three thumbs down.
you're kidding. That must be why it's in Black and White and all the actors are currently resting in the dirt...I am aware it is an old movie. That much is crystal clear. But thanks for the "helpful information"
+League Moments again, you have championed the art of stating the incredibly obvious. Yes, I mentioned stiff acting. It is a criticism/complaint. Now, I'm going to go back to work. Have a great day.
+League Moments again, you have championed the art of stating the incredibly obvious. Yes, I mentioned stiff acting. It is a criticism/complaint. Now, I'm going to go back to work. Have a great day.
Ayn Rand was a narcissistic fascist, an elitist enemy of democracy and working men and women, and she was a horrendous novelist and essayist. To call her characters "wooden" would be too kind a description of her artistic ineptitude; her prose style was dogmatic, pedantic , dull witted and without grace. She worships the idea of male power and tries her hardest to give intellectual justification for Roark's rape of Dagney. The argument is implicit and obvious, which is that as a genius, Roark had the right to take what or who wanted.
As is often the case, you can only attack Rand by making up lies about what she said. She advocated reason, not force (fascism depends on force), the freedom of the individual, and people being able to reap the rewards of their own efforts. She clearly stated that Roark having sex with Dominique was by "engraved invitation" (as she put it), which means it was not rape by definition.
Correct. Her entire "philosphy" was but a tendentious working-out in print of her hatred of the Bolsheviks, who had dispossessed her hardworking merchant father -- twice -- and caused him to give up. Materially indulged as a little girl, with a pony, a French governess, and a townhouse in St. Petersburg, afterward she was just an anonymous refugee struggling to be recognized in both the professional and social scenes in NYC and Hollywood, both of which she considered socialist-dominated. The whole Rand edifice was an exercise in projection on her part.
@@roberthaworth8991 Sounds like you're exhibiting the usual left wing resentment towards successful people and their desire to have their children benefit from that success. One might just as well argue that Marx’s entire philosophy was a justification for his mooching off of Engels rather than producing something himself. One hardly needs to be “tendentious” to recognize the immense deprivation, misery, and death caused by the Bolshevik philosophy, which is the premiere example of thinking that individuals exist only to serve, even die for, the collective. Rand’s philosophy is very much needed to counter that attitude of self-sacrifice.
@@robertromero8692 A real, enduring philosophical system is based on a deep understanding of both history and of human nature. Marx's had at least the former. Rand's had neither, but was SUBJECTIVE in the extreme. That is, it was based on her own experience, which she improperly generalized and claimed applied to the whole world. The origins of her "philosophy" in her hero-worship of her father and her resentment of the NY and Hollywood elites who "held her back" from the greatness she felt she deserved in the literary and screenwriting professions aren't far to seek.
I wish they'd have cast George Sanders or Claude Rains instead of Robert Douglas as Ellsworth Toohey. In the novel, Toohey was more superficially charming than this one. Gary Cooper was too old for Roark. Gregory Peck would have been better. Robert Ryan would have made a better Gail Wynand. Patricia Neal was the only cast member who was absolutely perfect.
Any Rand was a lesbian complexed...ridicolous and pitiful book..the dialogues are ugly because she wrote them herself...the only ones enjoyed were Patricia and Gary who will have fucked behind the camera!!🤣😋😋
