The Fountainhead: The Movie

There is a wonderful bit of dialogue in the film version of The Fountainhead that wasn't in the book.

In the book, Dominique Francon has a brief moment of passion with a worker in a granite quarry. By "moment of passion," I mean that she flirts with the man, and later on he shows up at her home and forces himself on her. Much later, her husband Gail Wynand brings home the architect Howard Roark for dinner. When she sees Roark, she recognizes him as the quarryman.

In the film, the rape takes place more or less as in the book. But the subsequent meeting takes place in a public place, a celebration of the opening of Enright House. Dominique had written a column about Roark's work, and at their meeting she mentions her column. Roark (leering): I remember every line of it. Dominique: I wish I had never seen ... your building.

"Column" and "building": What clever ways to get around the censors!

The movie, directed by King Vidor, is a lot of fun, at least for someone who has read the book. Gary Cooper is twenty years too old to play Howard Roark; this is all but acknowledged in the opening scenes of the film, which zip through the novel's early years and only show Roark in darkened silhouette. But Coop is the right "type" for the role—upright and taciturn. Patricia Neal is brilliant as Dominique. She brings TEH CRAZEE, as they say, depicting a very disturbed and very beautiful woman. Raymond Massey is more than adequate as Gail Wynand. In Ayn Rand's screenplay, the figures of Keating and Toohey are much reduced from the book—a wise choice. Max Steiner's score is just the sort of stirring romantic music the film needs.

The clunky parts of dialogue are the sometimes lengthy discourses on Objectivism that Rand insisted on keeping in the screenplay. This was her privilege, and her philosophy is the driving force of the book; but Cooper's delivery of Roark's long courtroom speech is painfully wooden.

Still, Rand did a fine job chopping away big parts of the book to make a two-hour screenplay, and the movie came out much better than I expected.