The Fountainhead

Buy This Item The Fountainhead by Key Video  Available from Amazon  $14.99  on 11-28-2008     Key Video Clamshell edition includes 16 page booklet~~~~~~~Reviewer: B. Chandler (Arlington, Texas) - my reviews I had to search my thoughts to see if I was even going to review this film of which I bought a copy. You can argue film versus book until the cows come home. You could say "lets make this with Helen Mirren and Mel Gibson." You can have Turner colonize it. Well folks, it is not going to happen; so do not waste your time wishing, and look at this movie. An other reviewer quite correctly summed it up as a pretty faithful summary (as opposed to adaptation). In that you get the essence of the book with a few saved speeches. All the actors get their point over to you. This includes Gary Cooper as Howard Roark and Patricia Neal as Dominique. The scenes portray the story very well. The Frank Lloyd Wright architecture adds to the time period. The tone of the movie gives the impression that this was copied from a stage play where one person at a time talks and no one overlaps until the first person is finished. All in all ,the entire movie is worth the viewing. It is also worth keeping a copy to see what this review missed. Reader Reviews Since David O. Selznick (producer of "Gone With the Wind" and "Rebecca") didn't produce this as a faithful adaptation of the novel, but Henry Blanke ("The Maltese Falcon" and "Casablanca") DID, I recommend seeing the movie first. When you read the novel first, you cast it, design sets and play it out in your mind, and in my mind, Howard Roark is played by Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman is Dominique, and Orson Welles plays a thinly-veiled Charles Foster Kane, aka Gail Wynand. Screenplay by Charles Brackett and Ben Hecht, directed by Howard Hawks, Technicolor, music by Bernard Herrmann. Anyways, since that's all in my mind's eye, let us deal with what's really there: This film is the greatest example of post-German expressionism after World War II. Visually, it's overflowing with licht und schatten worthy of Lang and Murnau. This is the movie's greatest achievement, deftly accomplished by cinematographer Robert Burks, who confines Gary Cooper (the movie's martyred saint) in a shadow-world so oppressing, that it rivals Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" and Hitchcock's "I Confess" (for which Burks was also DP, as he was on all Hitch's films from the early 1950s through Marnie, in 1964, with the exception of "Psycho") for the sense of loneliness and psychological isolation which crowd in the hero. Burks owes a lot to "Citizen Kane" in the use of low-camera-angles employed in projecting the movie's tragic hero, Gail Wynand, played by Raymond Massey. Massey brings a British-Canadian flair to the role that is completely outrageous and incongruous with the role's Hell's Kitchen origins. So what! As with Cary Grant, Massey succeeds in the "willing-suspension-of-disbelief" department when it comes to ignoring his British accent. Burks' camera lingers longingly and tenderly on screen siren Patricia Neal, as Dominique. This is when REAL HOT WOMEN got Hollywood roles, and when the likes of Marilyn Monroe "replaced" Jane Russell and Kim Novak was groomed as the next Rita Hayworth. The scene in which Neal visits Coop's apartment with the none-too-subtle white fur bust ornament above her evening gown is priceless in the glamor department. A few reviewers call this movie "dated." If by dated, they mean not having untalented, unalluring and underfed matchsticks like Gwyneth Paltrow and Calista Flockheart, then, yes, "The Fountainhead" is dated. Britisher Robert Douglas plays Ellsworth Toohey, the rabble-rousing colmunist with over-the-top and villainous aplomb. Wielding his ever-present cigarette holder with blatant swishiness designed to circumvent the Hayes' office censors, Douglas gives the best flamboyant-homosexual-villian performance this side of Robert Walker, as the tortured Bruno in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train." Rounding out this bombastic Expressionist tour-de-force is Max Steiner's equally plush and bombastic Romantic score, which uses heavy brass and low strings to provide an aural sledgehammer that sets the action onscreen to the passionate sturm und drang of Tristan und Isolde. They don't make movie music like this anymore. Composer David Raksin ("Laura") once quipped that 1940s movie music overwhelmed the listener not only with foreboding, but with "fifthboding." Again, compare Steiner's "maximalism" (no pun intended) with the oat-bran sparseness of today's so-called composers such as Philip Glass (minimalist is too big a word to describe his simplistic, monotonous, scratchings) and Michael Nyman. "The Fountainhead" is a movie made about giants, by giants. Reality be damned, this movie is worthy of "Citizen Kane," "Metropolis" and "Double Indemnity." Now, once you've seen the movie, then read the book, which is even better! Do it the other way around, and you'll find yourself "what-if"ing the Fountainhead that could've been, rather than basking in this sterling example of 1940s cinema.

The Fountainhead Available from Amazon Price: $14.99 Updated on 11-28-2008.

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