Ostensibly about “[a]n uncompromising, visionary architect [who] struggles to maintain his integrity and individualism despite personal, professional and economic pressures to conform to popular standards” according to a logline, the 1949 film of The Fountainhead is, in fact, a stiff, wooden enterprise with characters so caricatured that you can practically see Ayn Rand speaking through their lips. Since she wrote the screenplay, I have no one else to blame for the melodramatic writing, which comes off more comical (unintentionally) than serious, and more cumbersome than fluid. As I’m sure is the case in the novel, characters are representative of “types” thrown together in the same universe to illustrate her philosophy of Objectivism, which, in her own words, is “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

The “heroic being” in the movie, architect Howard Roark, is played by a horribly miscast Gary Cooper. A Hollywood screen legend known for his rugged, cowboy looks and understated style of acting, Cooper’s stoic performance seems completely at odds with the passion required by the character. Roark, who literally fights the entire architecture establishment, turns down job after job, despite dire financial circumstances, because clients want him to design public pleasing buildings in an art-deco style devoid of individualism. Believing fervently that his architectural designs are an individual expression that must be accepted and built as intended, or else rejected outright (which they are in the early part of the film), Roark would rather perform back breaking manual labor excavating concrete from a quarry (which he does) than compromise his artistic vision.

While a person like Roark, in real life, would require a tremendous amount of passion (as well as a pretty large pair of cojones) to fight an entire profession, Gary Cooper’s delivery of even the most incendiary line is so restrained that if it weren’t for his powerful screen presence, one might easily find it laughable. Add to that the fact that we are supposed to believe that middle-aged Cooper is a college age architecture student at the beginning of the film and then subsequently an architect in his early to mid 20s, and the film borders on the incredulous, not to mention comedic.

But, perhaps, looking at it from another angle, the problem is not Gary Cooper’s acting, since he’s delivered a number of fine performances, most notably as Marshall Will Kane in High Noon and as Peter Ibbetson in the lesser known, eponymous 1935 film. The problem, I suspect, is Rand’s overly melodramatic writing. When dialogue is contrived, the acting suffers because actors have a difficult time connecting with the words and delivering their lines. As the old theater adage goes, if it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage. Yet, given his experience and in light of what I’ve seen of his better performances, I’m inclined to speculate that Gary Cooper may have recognized the danger in playing the character like he’s written, with passion and fire, because taking the melodrama literally could have pushed the film over the top into a full-blown farce. Perhaps, then, he wisely chose to play against character, to underplay it rather than embody Roark with gusto. Either way, his character comes off bland and humorless, and Rand’s faulty writing is pretty evident.

If Cooper’s acting is at one end of the spectrum, then Patricia Neal’s is at the other. Playing his love interest, the mysterious, angst-ridden Dominique Francon, she gives a performance that, though outrightly laughable at times (due again to melodramatic writing helped along by a melodramatic score), has the color of alienation and the haughty air of a spoiled girl, or an ennui-soaked princess. A pessimist and a paradox, Dominique destroys what she loves because she does not want the object of her love “to be part of a world in which beauty, greatness and genius have no chance.” Sexually repressed but radiating a magnetic sexuality, she is the kind of woman no man can possess, yet when she herself can’t possess the man she wants, Roark, she takes it as a grave offense. In a famous scene that some liken to rape, she comes onto Roark by running away, causing him to pursue and take her by force, which was no doubt her intention. In parts of Neal’s portrayal, I see a precursor to Monica Viitti’s erratic and compelling performances in several great Micaelangelo Antonioni films, namely The Eclipse but especially Red Desert. And yet Neal’s performance suffers too from a lack of connection to the words; her facial expressions are sometimes blank and make you wonder if it’s vacuousness she wants to convey, or if she’s simply uncertain about what to emote.

“While the film comes close to making an admirable statement about resisting conformity and expressing your individuality through art, and of never giving up in your struggle to do so, in the end Rand’s heavy moralizing comes down like a sledgehammer.”

Perhaps my biggest problem with The Fountainhead is that Rand constructs a black and white universe to prove her point, a place where extremes are the only choices, where there’s never a middle way and no possibility of compromise. It’s either the client’s way or Roark’s, it’s either architecture or drilling granite, it’s either Roark give up architecture for his love of Dominique (which, as a bona fide Randian “heroic being,” I can assure you he does not) or he give her up instead. Virtually every scenario in the film is set up as a false dilemma so that the character has no choice but to be driven toward his own happiness, or face an alternative that is the very antithesis of his raison d’etre. While the film comes close to making an admirable statement about resisting conformity and expressing your individuality through art, and of never giving up in your struggle to do so, in the end Rand’s heavy moralizing comes down like a sledgehammer. When Roark, in what would today be called an act of “terrorism,” blows up a public housing project he designed because it was altered against his will and he was powerless to stop construction, he is brought before a court of law. In the climax of the film, Roark defends himself in a long, expository speech that sums up Rand’s philosophy and, of course, leads to his acquittal while simultaneously turning around public opinion that was rabidly against him.

Lest I beat up the film a little too much, I will say that King Vidor’s direction, Robert Burks’ cinematography, and David Weisbart’s editing make for visually pleasurable and easy viewing, as they should considering that all three were seasoned studio professionals. (Robert Burks photographed a number of Hitchcock films, including Rear Window and Vertigo, and David Weisbart cut Mildred Pierce and Dark Passage.) Raymond Massey and Robert Douglas, as billionaire newspaper mogul Gail Wynand and the delectably scheming, architecture critic Ellsworth M. Toohey respectively, are excellent. And Ayn Rand’s screenplay, despite its egregious faults, is well-plotted and has a clear three-act structure that any average moviegoer could follow.

In the end, though I obviously do not enthusiastically recommend this film, I’m glad I watched it. 114 minutes saved me the trouble of reading 752 pages I’d never get through, and I instantly got the jist of Ayn Rand’s philosophy: Never compromise, never give up, and always pursue your own rational self-interest and happiness as your own moral obligation–even if it might cause the unintentional suffering of others, be it one’s lover, the public good or the planet.