NR | 1 h 52 min | Drama | 1949
If a man isn’t true to himself and, therefore, to his creations (paintings, poems, novels, architecture or music), they and he won’t endure. Director King Vidor’s anti-communist film suggests that individuals must not submit unreservedly to a concocted common good. Far from serving society, they corrupt it. While communism strives to erase the individual, this tale reflects on the reverse. It is the free-thinking, self-respecting individual who decides what society will, and won’t, become.
Two architects take different stairways to success in “The Fountainhead.” In a world that celebrates conformity, success eludes the unbendingly innovative, idealistic, and individualistic architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper). Meanwhile, his opportunistic colleague Peter Keating (Kent Smith) finds success in sameness.
Two architecture columnists for the newspaper The Banner also take different pathways to success. In making or breaking architectural careers, Ellsworth Toohey (Robert Douglas) prizes perverse submission to an immoral social superstructure. Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal) salutes the opposite. Their cynical publisher, Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey) allows both columns to coexist literally on the same page, even if his columnists are figuratively on different pages.
The fetching Francon floats like a bewitching breeze around and between columns of the masculine kind: engaged to Keating, then in love with Roark, she marries Wynand. Success mimics her, sort of. It flirts with Keating who’s rewarded with, then robbed of architectural commissions. It dates, then deserts the whimsical Wynand. But it can’t stop gazing at the unflinchingly principled Roark.
Ayn Rand’s novel on which the film and the screenplay is based, concedes that the stuff of buildings—cement, metal, brick, glass, stone—is the same for all builders, just as the stuff of humans, such as cell, tissue, muscle, bone, skin, and hair. All buildings needn’t look alike, just as all humans needn’t think, talk, or act alike.
Francon tells Wynand that they’re alike. Roark tells Wynand that they’re alike. But faced with submitting to public opinion which Toohey finds appealing, Roark opts instead to use explosives and raze his creation—a spectacular skyscraper—that has been structurally and aesthetically sullied beyond recognition by clients. Here, dynamite serves as a metaphor for defiance of an illusory, and ultimately insidious, common good.
Defiance, Yes, But of What?
The very act of human existence is defiance—a defiance of anonymity, of sickness, of accidents, of natural disasters. This is like a building or statue, which by its very existence defies gravity, rises up like a fist, embodying human ambition, will, hope, and dignity.To Roark, defiance is desirable only if ordered to a higher purpose, without which it debases. Here, The Banner is code for communism’s endless societal churning, protesting against everything and everyone: this and that, ours and theirs, yours and mine. Wynand believes stoking divisiveness and cancel culture spikes newspaper readership. He thinks he controls the “masses,” but they’re the ones in control.
Toohey chants the mantra of “self-sacrifice.” He means mindless submission of the self. But to Roark, independence of thought is his supreme possession. To what must he sacrifice it? To whom, ... for it is the self that must not be sacrificed. A man’s self is his spirit. It is the “unsacrificed self” that others must respect in him. He knows they won’t, unless he respects it in himself.
Ironically, copyright law started out centuries ago primarily to raise state revenues, and to grant governments control over what’s published. Only later did it swerve to protect the artistic, creative, and intellectual rights of creators.
When a jury pronounces a verdict on Roark’s dynamite stunt, he’s called to rise and face them. A contrite Wynand rises, too. He knows that he falls short, but considers himself on trial, too, aspiring to Roark’s indestructible conviction. Colleagues and clients wonder why Roark doesn’t bend to “common standards.” After all, he has to make a living. Roark retorts, “Not that way. ... I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. ... I set my own standards.”
Greatness, genius, nobility, and beauty never emerge from the “masses.” These qualities spring, always and only, from the individual.
