At Last, No Shrugs

FOR THE EXACT REASONS The Fountainhead is pure dogshit to read—the crazy confidence; the characters who pass for human the way a plastic packet of ketchup passes for dinner; the schoolyard penchant for bigness and toughness; the insistence on triple-underlining every step of the case for selfishness; and, in spite of this, the failure to make that case coherently—the 1949 film adaptation is pure dopamine to watch.

Coherence, not to get all Jacques Derrida straight away, is overrated. Under the right circumstances, watching art knock against itself can be more fun than watching the pieces obligingly come together, and the Warner Bros. Fountainhead gets this as very few works of art ever do. It is a picture most acquainted with noisy, jagged action—in the first half hour alone glass shatters, marble cracks, somebody gets slapped hard enough to break the skin, and somebody else dies. In these moments of destruction, weirdly, the filmmakers are at their most creative and seem to intuit something about the ecstasy of creation: Real art needs stuff to lash out at, or it’s in danger of becoming mere decoration, bland prettiness. The Fountainhead, as punk a product as the studio system ever green-lit, is still snarling today because it seems to lash out at itself. The ultimate badge of honor: The New York Times found it “pretentious.”

Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead (I’ll call it TF to avoid confusion) was not an instant hit when it was published in 1943, but by the summer of 1948, when King Vidor began shooting the film, close to half a million Americans had read a copy or at least bought one. For a studio adaptation of a high-profile book, a surprising number of newcomers were involved, beginning with Rand, who had never written a screenplay before. Gary Cooper, who plays Howard Roark, was as famous as a Hollywood leading man could be, but his costar Patricia Neal had only one other feature credit. The studio wanted Frank Lloyd Wright to design the sets but ended up hiring the relatively untested Edward Carrere, possibly because its first choice wanted too much money. Even Vidor, forty-seven pictures deep, was new to Warner Bros.

Sparks flew early and often. Rand’s dialogue transplanted vast, droney hunks of prose from her novel, but when she found out Vidor had cut her work, she threatened to buy newspaper ads telling everybody to boycott the film. The studio promised there would be no further changes but then made secret snips Rand didn’t discover until The Fountainhead was safe in theaters. Later, she said she had disliked the climactic courtroom scene because one of her lines had been removed. Vidor thought too many of the others had stayed in. And so, a motion picture about the glory of the uncompromising lone artist was haggled and bickered into being.

The result, you will not be too shocked to learn, has never been particularly beloved, which isn’t quite the same as never being admired. If anything, this film has too many admirers—too many of the wrong kind. A chapter meeting of the Fountainhead fan club would be a Beckmannesque bedlam: Steven Spielberg trying to talk some sense into the sullen teenagers who worship Rand as a goddess; Martin Scorsese going full Travis Bickle on Clarence Thomas (apparently the Honorable Justice likes to invite new clerks to his house for screenings); Slavoj Žižek ripping lines with Wall Street bros, thumb-sucking paleoconservatives, and the ghost of Michael Cimino. No surprise, then, that most of the praise for The Fountainhead not coming from libertarian sociopaths tends to be vague and slightly backhanded—Marty called it “insane,” for instance. Meanwhile, the haters have never had trouble pointing out its flaws, principally its cheesy glorification of capitalism. They’re not wrong, either. Though when you sit down and try to specify the differences between this film and plenty of universally adored multiplex fare you end up with a shorter list than you might expect.

EVEN IF YOU HAVE NO IDEA what happens in The Fountainhead, you know what happens in The Fountainhead. You’ve seen it hundreds of times, with the names and métiers changed. The young architecture student Howard Roark is expelled for the crime of being a brooding genius. While working in a marble quarry, he embarks on an affair with Dominique Francon, an architecture critic starved for buildings worthy of her words. Long since resigned to mediocrity, she is engaged to Peter Keating, a rival of Roark’s whose buildings are blandsome crowd-pleasers and whose body language is a permanent smarmy hunch.

Roark claws his way back into architecture, starts getting commissions, wins praise for his originality even though his work seems suspiciously indebted to Frank Lloyd Wright. His success angers the wicked newspaper columnist Ellsworth Toohey but makes Keating come groveling for help. Since Roark doesn’t care about credit, only art, he agrees to design the city’s new housing project and slap his old classmate’s name on it, provided everything be done his way. Keating fails to protect Roark’s modernistic towers from the municipal board’s neoclassical nips and tucks; Roark decides to blow the whole thing up, since it’s ruined already; and Dominique, now married to the newspaper tycoon Gail Wynand but still in love with her quarry Übermensch, helps plant the dynamite. At trial, Roark delivers a long ode to shameless self-interest that dazzles the jurors into setting him free.

A young hero first tested and then rewarded for staying true to himself is, shall we say, nothing out of the ordinary in Golden Age Hollywood. Which makes it all the more hypnotically strange that this hero doesn’t do the typical hero things—doesn’t laugh or twinkle or pet a dog or ruffle a kid’s hair or risk his life for the good of his neighbor. Instead, Roark is utterly and humorlessly obsessed with his own wants, very much like the kind of gangster played by James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart, if actual gangsters had bankrolled the project and made themselves the good guys.

Bogart was Rand’s first choice for the lead, but the studio chose Gary Cooper, proving it is possible for a casting decision to be all wrong and still totally inspired. The actor was forty-seven years old when he took the part of a twenty-something architecture student, but the incongruity has its own logic, since Howard Roark is a grown-up among kids. Bogart would have given the character too much of a bark; he might have psychologized Roark to death, reducing worldview to inner wound. Cooper barely raises his voice. When he shows pain, it’s with a clenched brow or a drooping lip—disappointment with others, never himself. Even when he’s telling the courtroom he has the right to blow up buildings, his tone is as calmly insistent as a schoolteacher’s. Do pay attention, won’t you: He is your superior in every respect, and you should be grateful for whatever gifts his genius bestows on humanity—any questions? Spending two hours in the company of this person, you have the sense that a mask has slipped off, that a beautiful Hollywood millionaire is finally admitting what all his peers believe but are too sensible to say.

Lest I make The Fountainhead sound like too much of a metatextual tangle, let me repeat: It rips. There are no warm moments but no dull ones, either, and it’s full of lively grotesques who delight whether or not they are, strictly speaking, human. TF’s life force was supposed to be Roark’s big, beautiful brain (hence the title), but any Fountainhead viewer knows that the real vitality resides in Patricia Neal, who, as Dominique, gives a performance as frenzied and full-bodied as Cooper’s is stoic.

It must be one of the great breakout roles: as abstract as modern dance, teleported here from another galaxy, and, for that reason, ageless. Neal is introduced throwing a statue from a building—“I wanted to destroy it rather than let it be part of a world where beauty, genius, and greatness have no chance. The world of the mob”—and doesn’t let up until the end. Everything she does, no matter how casual, has the same hard, glittery artificiality: When she gets up from a chair it looks like she’s levitating; when she breaks her fireplace as an excuse to keep talking to Roark she waves the poker as though banishing demons. Even when she’s silent, her penciled eyebrows sing. She was all of twenty-two.

My own favorite character in The Fountainhead, however, is Ellsworth Toohey, the critic drawled and smirked into being by the prolific character actor Robert Douglas. (Toohey also seems to have been a particular favorite of Frank Lloyd Wright, at least when he read the novel.) Something like the Platonic ideal of the midcentury Hollywood movie villain, he is the proud owner of a mustache almost as expressive as Neal’s eyebrows, as well as a cigarette holder that deserved its own spot on the call sheet. Naturally, he has a British accent. He is also the best example of the quality that keeps The Fountainhead racing ahead where TF lags: Even the characters in this movie who were written as pathetic mediocrities seem oddly resplendent in their mediocrity, high on the same primal energies as Roark himself. When Toohey is fired, he immediately gets rabble-rousing, and the public becomes so indignant that his former publisher has no choice but to hire him back again. It’s enough to bring tears to my tired, freelancer eyes.

THE NAKED LIBERTARIANISM, the violence, the slosh of different acting styles—so far, I’ve avoided the most bizarre thing about this movie, which is that it’s about architecture.

I can put that another way. Why are there so many movies in which the main character designs buildings but so few in which building design has anything much to do with the plot? The first part is probably easier to explain: Architecture is one of the few creative jobs that America hasn’t deemed totally useless, sinister, effeminate, or queer (though lately there’s been a creepy mainstreaming of the view that contemporary architecture is decadent trash—just ask Ross Douthat at the Times). It’s sensitive but still practical, dreamy but still macho, which explains all the romantic comedies in which the male lead plays a handsome young architect. It’s also one of the last remaining art forms any American can enjoy for free, which must earn it some bonus points. All the odder, then, that architecture rarely amounts to more than cinematic backdrop. Buildings onscreen are setting and little else, and the exceptions burn briefly and vanish: When two architecture movies play in multiplexes around the same time, as The Brutalist and Megalopolis did in late 2024, critics get scribbling, because nobody knows when the stars will align again. When two movies about a writer or a musician or an actor coincide, does anyone even bother pointing it out?

You might well think that architects would have lost their minds when a major motion picture presented one of their own as the savior and his work as the apex of human achievement. Instead, many seemed to find the experience of sitting through The Fountainhead roughly akin to being whacked on the nose. The Journal of the American Institute of Architects reprinted the film’s cruelest reviews, and Interiors ran a feature by the great designer George Nelson mocking Carrere’s imaginary buildings for their impossibility. Professionals often have trouble seeing themselves on-screen, I suppose—growing up, I couldn’t watch a trial movie without my dad explaining why a real lawyer would never do X, and today anyone can visit YouTube and listen to some pro boxer explain why the fight scenes in Raging Bull (1980) are somewhat less than realistic. One has to wonder, too, if Carrere was punished simply for being Frank Lloyd Wright’s replacement—if his obvious pastiche proved an irresistible target for critics desperate to show off their knowledge of the real thing. (When Nelson interviewed Mies van der Rohe in 1935, he wasn’t able to share his subject’s enthusiasm for Wright, and it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to imagine how this youthful awkwardness might have led to some overcompensating later on.)

The modernist mansion that got Nelson all pearl-clutchy appears an hour into The Fountainhead, during a montage of Roark’s creations. Like most of the architecture in the film, it’s defined (or really, composed of) cantilevered balconies, roofs, and pergolas in an on-off relationship with the laws of gravity. The inspiration is clearly Fallingwater, but with floating planes as wide as the deck of a cruise ship, these evidently being Roark’s calling cards—a few scenes earlier, he builds a skyscraper on Central Park South that looks to be 90 percent floating balcony. Nelson did some digging and determined that these and most of the other structures in this movie were—get this—implausible. “We observe,” he observed, “that the balcony itself could only support itself [sic] if its structure continued through the room behind, making it useless.” He’s right. I assume that boxer is right about De Niro’s jabs in Raging Bull, too, not that I plan to boycott Scorsese anytime soon. Scolding cinema for refusing to obey reality isn’t hard, though when you consider how many of the coolest movie-structures are architecturally bogus, from the Overlook Hotel to the Emerald City to Xanadu to the War Room, you may wonder why anyone wastes their breath.

My own gripe with The Fountainhead’s architecture has nothing to do with the ins and outs of building it. Nelson complains that Carrere’s faux Fallingwater is distracting in its unbelievability; I say it’s not distracting enough. Like most of what Roark makes, it sits there in an establishing shot or two, politely accepting whatever attention you care to donate, and then is seen no more. Over the course of that montage, we watch a series of buildings bloom from blueprint to reality, but none seem much more striking in three dimensions than in two. The problem isn’t simply that all the completed buildings are models or matte drawings—so are Xanadu and the Emerald City. Instead, Roark’s “good” creations seem guilty of the same sins he points out in other people’s “bad” ones: They don’t leave much impression, don’t reach out and grab you by the collar, don’t transform the lives of the people inside. (They’re also derivative of other architects’ work, but since Frank Lloyd Wright seems not to exist in the world of this film, we can set that complaint aside.) In terms of pure sensory wallop, there is nothing here that can go ten rounds with the factory in Dodsworth (1936), the living room in The Black Cat (1934), the hell-with-a-swivel-chair office space in Vidor’s early masterpiece The Crowd (1928), or pretty much any building in Orson Welles. When Roark attends a swanky cocktail party inside the high-rise he’s designed, the guests sip and schmooze but don’t ooh at the miracle on all sides of them. They just got here, and already they’ve forgotten where they are.

Is any of this Carrere’s fault, though? One reason there are so few movies about people who design buildings must be that buildings are especially, maybe uniquely uncinematic. If this sounds flat-out wrong, try comparing architecture with some of its more screen-ready siblings: music, the universal language, does great in movies; painting does almost as well, being two-dimensional to start with; and even poetry can assert itself with voice-overs that give some sense of the whole. Dances seems to thrive no matter how hands-on or -off the filmmaking: In 35 Shots of Rum (2008), the camera does everything short of swaying along with Alex Descas and Mati Diop; in Top Hat (1935), it barely moves or zooms or cuts—no need when it can sit and gape at Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

But with architecture, the camera can’t afford to sit and gape. I don’t want to be too rigid about this—film doesn’t have hard rules any more than Roark’s buildings have structural integrity. What it does have, though, are natural strengths, and conveying weight and solidity simply isn’t one of them. Too much has been lost on the way to the screen; the cinematographer needs to work wonders to put the pounds back again. It might be the case that there is no dramatic architecture in cinema, only dramatically shot architecture (better a well-lensed shack than a dull Taj Mahal). Looking back at my own examples of memorable on-screen buildings, I notice that without meaning to I’ve chosen films full of low-angled compositions, so that we often seem to be staring up at the structures staring down on us. Not for nothing is the hotel in The Shining (1980) called the Overlook: The sheer tonnage of its floors floats above the inhabitants, politely declining to crush them. It’s the unspoken miracle of all buildings, or at least the ones Roark doesn’t blow up.

BACK TO CHAOS WE GO! It’s baffling that in one of the few noteworthy Hollywood movies about architecture there are no noteworthy scenes starring a finished work of architecture. Whenever The Fountainhead is obliged to linger on a building, the filmmakers might as well be yawning; the second we get back to the half-built and the unbuilt and the ruined, things perk up again. Still more baffling: In between the unmemorable buildings and high-rises, this film has three of the most powerful architectural scenes I can think of, each served with a generous pour of death and destruction. This has a lot to do with Rand’s politics, of course, but probably something to do with the hidden anarchy of architecture, too: Even the squarest Midtown office building, you may feel after watching this film, has a little punk in it.

The first scene is the easiest one to miss. Early on, Roark’s mentor Henry Cameron (the Louis Sullivan to Roark’s Frank Lloyd Wright) collapses in mid-monologue and is rushed to the hospital still grumbling about the world’s mediocrity. In the ambulance, the dying architect gazes out through the window at a passing art deco high-rise and whimpers to Roark, “I built that.” (They also pass the Equitable Building on 120 Broadway, probably a nod to The Crowd, in which it makes a memorable appearance.) He didn’t, of course: The building, which we see for maybe five seconds, is 240 Central Park South, designed by Albert Mayer and Julian Whittlesey. A bizarre choice on the filmmakers’ part: Of all the towers in New York City, they went with one praised by Lewis Mumford, the socialist architecture critic on whom Rand partly based Ellsworth Toohey.

Still—what a brisk, sad wonder of a scene. (Did Miloš Forman have it in mind when he shot the opening of Amadeus [1984], another perfect short film about artistic failure, dying, and moving through the streets while on your back?) We’re six minutes in and already the stakes for Roark’s climb to greatness have been so firmly established we won’t forget: In this movie, it’s not enough to design a great building. The architect can’t merely create; he has to stay in complete control of his life, his career, the world—otherwise he ends up in an ambulance, half consoled and half tormented by his old creations.

If this sounds silly, and it should, compare it with The Fountainhead’s final scene. Roark has talked his way out of jail and, as an encore, convinced his frenemy Gail Wynand to offer him the commission for the Wynand Building “the tallest structure in the world”; before the ink on the contract is dry, Wynand shoots himself, saving Dominique the hassle of asking him for a divorce. Just before THE END, the new Mrs. Roark pays a visit to the construction site, where she learns her husband is waiting at the top. Up, up, up the elevator goes while the music moans and New York City shrinks. In the film’s final seconds, Neal’s eyes widen in gooey worship as the camera zooms in on Howard Roark, frowning down on the human race from the top of his skyscraper.

It really does seem like his. True, it’s called the Wynand Building, but Wynand is dead, and Vidor makes sure we see the words “HOWARD ROARK, ARCHITECT” by the entrance. Notice, too, that nobody at this construction site seems to be doing much work: One laborer’s entire job would appear to be buzzing Dominique in, and the three others she passes by elevators are going down, not up. The implication, so absurd it’s kind of fabulous, would seem to be that this is a one-man show: This entire skyscraper came straight out of Roark’s head and hands, and if, tomorrow, he feels like destroying it, he would be well within his rights.

“The creator’s concern,” Roark patiently explains in his closing argument, “is the conquest of nature.” Speaking as one of the foolish mortals he’s addressing, I find this confusing: Naughty schoolkids, hotel contractors in Hawaii, and Agent Orange manufacturers are all concerned with conquering nature, but isn’t there something more to it than that? As far as The Fountainhead is concerned, the answer might be “nah”: In one hour and fifty-four minutes, we see an artist making art exactly once, and he does it sarcastically. And yet (this film is one big “and yet”): Just because an idea is laughably incomplete doesn’t mean it’s wrong. There is a naughty schoolkid in any artist; there is an implicit breaking in the act of building; there is glee in crushing, bending, torching, melting, and hammering nature into art.

If I had to explain this to a skeptical stranger and could use any movie clip to make my case, I’d go with The Fountainhead’s third great architectural scene, in which Dominique sees Howard Roark sweating away in the quarry. The sun shines bright, his drill gnashes at the granite, and the air is thick with dust and lust as her lips part hungrily. Part of the shock here, seventy-six years later, is the fact that a Hollywood movie made in perfect obedience to the Hays Code can be shocking. The censors wouldn’t permit Vidor to show Roark shirtless, but it doesn’t matter: The camera’s lazy slide across Cooper’s forearm, savoring every hair and vein, is more pornographic than some actual porn. It’s also a nice reminder that real-life geniuses like King Vidor don’t need to blow up their work when it runs the risk of censorship. If they couldn’t find a way around the rules, what kinds of geniuses would they be?

But forget the eroticism. Forget the drill and the riding crop and the other phallic gizmos: The real shock of this scene is the Where, not the Freudian Why. It was filmed in a functioning stone quarry in Knowles, California, in temperatures as high as 126 degrees, and good god was it worth the trouble: No building in The Fountainhead has anything close to the heft of this nonplace where so many actual buildings began—you can taste the metal in the air, feel the machinery spasming in your hands. Most of all, you feel the weight of raw, rough, magnificent stuff in every direction. It may even occur to you, watching that forearm, that people are stuff, too, a special kind that has figured out how to rip things out of the ground and make them do our bidding; and that every trick we’ve learned to play with our stuff, every skyscraper or sculpture or print edition of New York Review of Architecture, begins with an act of destruction like the one Vidor shows us—a gorgeous desecration of the way things were. Not art, but no art without it.

YOU DON‘T NEED TO BE George Nelson to spot the contradictions here. The raw material in The Fountainhead has a magic the finished skyscrapers lack, yet it’s the skyscrapers we’re supposed to coo over. (Something similar goes for The Brutalist, whose best scene is also set in a quarry, just before one of the most asinine rape scenes in cinematic history.) Ordinary Homo sapiens like Dominique and Toohey get all the best zingers, yet it’s Howard Roark whose charisma is supposed to be irresistible. No skyscraper was ever constructed by a single worker, let alone a worker who moonlights as the architect, yet we’re supposed to accept that the Wynand Building is Roark’s and no one else’s.

And, really, aren’t these versions of the same contradiction? The Fountainhead keeps trying to pass off dependence (on material, on workers, on other people generally) as extreme independence; the more shrilly it insists that Roark doesn’t need anyone’s help, the more obviously he does. The same glitch is there in the climactic scene: After ninety minutes of bending reality to his wants, this Superman stands before the jurors and puts his fate in their hands, and the jurors are nice enough to toss it right back to him. Who could have guessed the mob—that thing Roark is saving us from—would turn out to be so reasonable?

Nonsensical? No doubt, but we are dealing with a hallowed kind of nonsense that’s quite well attested to in our culture. Rand knew all about it, though she was too savvy a careerist to admit so in public. A quick flip through her collected letters reveals a radical individualist who cared deeply about what other people thought of her and wept over bad reviews of TF and Atlas Shrugged (1957). (John Galt would be ashamed of her, she wrote to a friend.) So it goes. Self-styled Supermen and Superwomen seem suspiciously reliant on the approval of ordinary folk, which might explain why symbols of one so often end up linked to the other—it’s funny, for instance, how “Superman” has come to refer to a character who is both the common man’s superior and his devoted servant. Funnier still: Zack Snyder, the director of Batman Versus Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), has been planning a new adaptation of TF for years.

If he ever gets around to it, I predict he’ll have a hit on his hands—these kinds of things do tend to be. The nonsense goes both ways: Masters of the universe may lean on common people, but common people seem happy to reciprocate with unlimited time and attention and money, though most of the time the master half pretends to be common, too. There is very little that’s ridiculous about the finale of The Fountainhead that isn’t ridiculous about, say, the finale of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), another movie in which Gary Cooper triumphs by making a long speech at a trial. They would make for a good double feature: the two Coopers, so different in every respect that they turn out spookily identical. In his closing argument, Longfellow Deeds stresses how ordinary he is—so extraordinarily ordinary the whole courtroom cheers when he’s released. Call this a “soft” Randianism: Mr. Deeds is more interesting than you because he’s exactly like you. It’s almost refreshing to turn back to the “hard” Randianism of The Fountainhead, in which the protagonist really is just like you and me: a self-interested asshole.

No, none of this adds up. Instead, it keeps racing around and around in its cage, refusing to stay still long enough to be understood. There are at least a dozen different films rattling inside The Fountainhead, some heroic and some erotic and some cautionary and some comic. The last time I watched, I realized that everything makes perfect sense if you begin from the premise that Howard Roark is a terrible architect, not a great one. Seen this way, we are dealing with a parable about how easily the public is swayed by rude, cocky mediocrities—the Donald Trumps, the Elon Musks, the Yayoi Kusamas, the Steve Jobses, the Tracy Emins, the Julian Schnabels, the Ayn Rands—whose only talent is for calling themselves brilliant and not blushing. This was not the intended point, of course. But it seems very Roarkian, and in keeping in the spirit of this brightly barbaric film, to bend the raw material of The Fountainhead into whatever point we feel like making. We’re the mob, after all. We have to keep ourselves entertained somehow.