The Films of Ayn Rand
by Stephen CoxCopyright 1987 by Stephen Cox. All rights reserved. It may not be downloaded, copied, reprinted, or republished in any medium or form. This article appeared originally in the August 1987 issue of Liberty magazine, and is reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. For information about the author and his other works, please see the end of this essay.
Film is a popular art and a cooperative one. It appeals to a mass audience, and its creation requires the collaboration of many artists. The novelist, even the novelist afflicted with editors, has an easier time maintaining control over his work than does the writer of films, whose scripts must be brought to life by producers, directors, cinematographers, and actors. It is partly because film is a collaborative art that it is so often the art of situations instead of ideas or characters. A basic situation--boy meets girl, bank robber meets bank, Godzilla meets Tokyo--may survive the process of film-making, and may even be intensified by that process, while subtle character analysis and complex ideas perish. Basic dramatic situations have more obvious appeal to a mass audience than do carefully developed philosophical theses. This helps to account for the fact that film is so often sentimental, in the sense that it presents situations that exploit and confirm common emotional responses rather than suggesting ideas that might challenge them.
As a novelist, Ayn Rand was a devoted anti-sentimentalist, continually challenging commonplace reactions. She did so by writing fiction that attempts to explain why those reactions are philosophically inappropriate. Fiction of her kind requires scope: the arguments of The Fountainhead could never be encapsulated in a two-hour, or a twenty-hour, movie. And, of course, Rand was an individualist artist who aspired to total control of her work. When Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House, wanted her to cut Atlas Shrugged, she asked him, "Would you cut the Bible?" 1 Rand seems a very unpromising candidate for film-maker--yet she wrote three films.
Most readers of Rand are familiar with only one of these films, the cinematic version of The Fountainhead. But to get a sense of her struggles with the Hollywood movie, one must consider all three.
- You Came Along
Paramount, 1945
Producer: Hal B. Wallis
Director: John Farrow
Cast: Robert Cummings, Lizabeth Scott, Don DeFore, Charles Drake, Kim Hunter
You Came Along is the weakest of her films, and probably the most collaborative; Rand's screenplay was a revision of an original story by Robert Smith. The script is dominated by a basic, sentimental situation: a heroic World War II pilot is dying of some rare disease, he meets a heroic woman who marries him despite her knowledge of his impending doom, he succumbs bravely, she reacts bravely. In order to throw the grim events of the plot into sharpest emotional relief, or perhaps in order to keep the audience awake, the leading characters are forced to be comedians as well as heroes. The pilot and two happy-go-lucky buddies are traveling around the country selling war bonds, and his destined mate is assigned to travel with them as a representative of the Treasury Department. This in itself evokes humor: what a surprise that the Treasury agent turns out to be a woman! But travel provides further opportunities for comedy. The pilot arrives late at night in the wrong hotel room; he takes off his pants before discovering that his Treasury Department guide, not yet his wife, is occupying the bed; confusion reigns, etc.
Rand's humor, when evident at all--and it is frequently evident in the satirical parts of her novels--was not of this kind. It's easy to attribute the "comedy" in You Came Along to Robert Smith, who during his career got credits for seventeen not very distinguished pictures, of which You Came Along was his first.2 It's also easy to imagine that Smith, rather than Rand, was the source of the scenes in churches and chapels and of the religious epigraph (some pretty verses from Longfellow) that comes on the screen after the movie's titles. It was Rand, however, who apparently decided to include rather than exclude these elements.
Whatever trouble she may have had with them, she clearly had no trouble with the ideology of heroic love that is implicit in the plot. She adds an ideology of heroic joy. Like the morally exemplary characters in her novels, the movie's heroine rejects the ethos of suffering. She declares that she will never grieve for her husband or feel sorry that she married him. All this conforms to Rand's idea that individuals are ultimately responsible for their emotions and that life need not be painful even if its circumstances are.
Rand's heroine is understood as rising above the very situation from which the film derives its pathos--yet this hardly acquits the script of the charge of easy, situational sentiment. You Came Along is a formula picture that arouses highly predictable emotions, and there is nothing in the thought process of the characters that would trouble any audience with thinking. What makes the film endurable is Lizabeth Scott's portrayal of the heroine. Scott is so poised and luminous an actress that she can make the predictable seem, for the moment, meaningful--and perhaps there is a kind of meaningfulness in that. As for Rand's other collaborator, Robert Cummings, who plays the pilot: he was apparently so pleased with his role that he used the name of his character, Robert Collins, as the name of the comic protagonist of his 1955-59 television series The Bob Cummings Show, which concerned the adventures of a fly-boy turned photographer. Popular culture, like an archaeological site, exhibits many strata of debris.
- Love Letters
Paramount, 1945
Producer: Hal B. Wallis
Director: William Dieterle
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Jennifer Jones, Ann Richards, Gladys Cooper, Robert Sully
Love Letters is a much more interesting film, if only because its central situation is more complex than the rudimentary disease-death-emotional transcendence situation in You Came Along. The plot involves an English officer, Alan Quinton (played by Joseph Cotten), who ghost-writes love letters to another soldier's girl back home. It's essentially the Peter Keating-Howard Roark, parasite-host relationship, and Quinton's buddy even says the Keatingish things that one would expect from a Randian second-hander:
- Quinton: She's in love with these letters that you didn't write. With my letters.
- Parasite: What's the difference?
- Quinton: She's in love with a man who doesn't exist.
- Parasite: Oh well, I'll make a good substitute.
The woman is indeed in love. According to her letters, she is seeking "a man who would look at life, not as a burden or a punishment, but as a dream of beauty which we can make real." Quinton's ghost-written letters are so eloquent, so lyrical, so individual, that she thinks she has found her man. She marries the purported author, not knowing that he is a cad. She gradually realizes that his character does not match his words--and then he is killed, knifed to death, supposedly by his disappointed spouse, who loses her memory and cannot furnish testimony about the crime.
I need not belabor all the typically Randian concepts for which this situation provides a vehicle. They include the uniqueness of real character, the sanctity of joy and beauty, and the alacrity with which joy and beauty are despoiled by emotional exploiters. There is the suggestion, too, of a typically Randian plot device, useful in challenging sentimental assumptions: a character commits an act that appears "obviously" wrong (Roark's destruction of Cortlandt Homes, for instance, or in this case the murder of the offending husband) but that can be justified by an unorthodox moral philosophy.
The framework of Love Letters is not, however, entirely of Rand's devising. While working for producer Hal Wallis, she found it difficult to discover properties to adapt for the screen. Finally she chose "out of sheer desperation" a novel in which she saw "at least the possibility of a dramatic situation." 3 The novel was The Love Letters, by a prolific but now totally forgotten author, Chris Massie. Massie's writing is a curious mixture of the spiritual and the clinical, of allusions to the Bible and talk of "sex starvation."4 His manner exaggerates the worst features of, say, H.G. Wells'--the manner of the tough village atheist who has suddenly gotten his own kind of religion. Beneath it lies an uncouth sincerity, a desire to break the quarantine on every sort of emotional sickness. As his autobiography, Confessions of a Vagabond, makes clear, Massie had been deeply traumatized by World War I.5 His protagonist in The Love Letters returns from war unfit for civilian life, and finds that he has "a nostalgia for... well, among other things... the smell of the dead. War stinks to high heaven, but it is the stink of something terribly real..."6
Observations of this sort might conceivably lead to a serious analysis of psychology, but Massie drifts in a less fortunate direction. He is not concerned with the individuality of character that Quinton's letters express: this is Rand's theme. In the novel, the heroine's marriage to the "author" of the letters fails to work because he accidentally dies, not because of his psychological flaws. She loses her memory and returns to what we are assured is a delightful state of innocence (actually of pure banality), in which she happens to meet Quinton and marry him. In the meantime, oddly enough, she is thought to have murdered an old lady whom Massie drags into the plot for no other reason than for his heroine to be accused of murdering her. Eventually, a second old lady confesses to the killing; just at that moment, however, the innocent heroine drowns in a failed attempt to save a drowning lamb (that's right, an innocent lamb). This bizarre plot provides Massie with evidence for his final judgment that beauty is born to die, that "life is travail and disappointment and tears." 7 If one wishes to criticize Rand's movie, one should first read Massie's book.
Rand does well to consolidate the plot, allowing the killing to acquire some significance, even some poetic appropriateness: it becomes the direct result of the misleading letters and therefore of a denial of true identity. She does still better by removing the maudlin ending. Ever the foe of pessimism, she arranges for Quinton and the heroine not only to meet and marry but also to continue enjoying happiness after the heroine's memory is restored and she discovers that it was her adoptive mother, not she, who did away with her husband. But here one suspects a concession to conventional notions of innocence, a concession that deforms Rand's story. Her plot is about the individual self and its aspirations, not about legal innocence. From the judicial standpoint, it may be interesting to wonder whether a certain amnesia victim actually slew her husband, but from the artistic standpoint nothing is gained by prolonging the mystery of who killed him, only to reveal that it wasn't the heroine. Nothing is gained, that is, but predictable sentiments. One is not unhappy when this film finally ends.
Love Letters is competently acted, despite the fact that Joseph Cotten does none of the special things that he could sometimes do, and Jennifer Jones (playing the heroine) has to represent too cloyingly sweet a character ever to be represented in an interesting way. Jones does not really act as if she were "hearing voices and being tickled at one and the same time,"8 but you get tired of her anyway. The director, William Dieterle, was a prominent practitioner of film noir. He could also practice other modes; he had worked with Max Reinhardt, for instance, on the wonderful film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Love Letters, however, is very noir, or at least very shadowy, and the sets are small and few and cheap. But the camera work is exacting; the shots are well planned and framed, and camera angles are properly expressive of emotional tones. What damages the movie is the empty sentiment of the amnesia-murder plot, a plot that Rand did not manage to make intellectually challenging.
- The Fountainhead
Warner Brothers, 1949
Producer: Henry Blanke
Director: King Vidor
Musical Score: Max Steiner
Cast: Gary Cooper, Raymond Massey, Patricia Neal, Kent Smith, Henry Hull, Robert Douglas, Ray Collins, Jerome Cowan
In creating the film version of The Fountainhead, Rand was working from her own book, she was attempting to realize her own ideas--not fix up someone else's--and she had every inclination to pester and cajole people into producing her script in precisely the way she wanted it produced. In this she had a large measure of success; she was no pathetic Peter Keating being "pushed from office to office" until artistic control was totally lost.
The film's director, King Vidor, a figure of no small importance in Hollywood, declined to take Rand's philosophy and mythology with complete seriousness. Discussing the film's centrally important episode, Howard Roark's dynamiting of Cortlandt Homes, Vidor wrote:
[Roark] tried in every way to restore the construction to his original idea [this isn't the way the movie goes, incidentally] but was unsuccessful. It was then that he decided to dynamite the face of each building.
To me this seemed a preposterous and impractical solution. I went to Jack Warner, the head of the studio, with the argument that if, when the picture was completed, anyone changed or edited some part of the film and I retaliated by destroying that part of the film, would he forgive my rash action. He replied that he would not but that a court judge might. 9
Nevertheless, as Vidor goes on to say, he admired Roark's artistic integrity.
Rand, of course, had none of her director's ambivalence, and so formidable did she make herself while her film was being created that she was allowed more influence on production than any other mere writer ever acquired in Hollywood. Vidor reported that "when actors wanted to change lines we had to telephone her and ask her to come over quickly and that helped stop a lot of actors changing lines."10 Rand was even permitted to coach Gary Cooper (Howard Roark) for his performance as Roark in the impressive courtroom scene. Impressive, but perhaps not impressive enough; Cooper and Rand agreed that "he didn't quite get it."11 The Fountainhead remained, inevitably, a collaboration--yet Rand bears most of the responsibility for its outcome.
Critics have been evaluating her achievement for the past forty years, but it is remarkable how often they seem to have been watching some movie besides The Fountainhead. Here I am not much concerned with hostile treatments, such as the one that Bosley Crowther gave the film in the New York Times. Crowther's review does sound as if it should appear in Ellsworth Toohey's "One Small Voice," although he is right about some things; he perceives, for example, that Gary Cooper's architecture is "trash."12 Of more concern are the misperceptions to which friendly as well as hostile critics have succumbed.
Charles Derry, who likes the book, likes the movie, and views it as an example of successfully "collaborative art," emphasizes its visual subtlety by asserting that "Ellsworth Toohey's first appearance is as a black silhouetted figure looming large in the foreground... Toohey, a man of shadowy ideas, is ready to try to dominate when the time is right." 13 In fact, Toohey first appears as a figure walking unobtrusively across the set behind Roark. This image captures not only Toohey's sinister quality, but also the fact that Roark does not--prefers not to--notice people like Toohey.
A small misperception--there are larger ones. Kevin McGann pictures the movie's Roark as "fight[ing] to convert the public and the architectural world to his thinking." In reality, Roark says that he doesn't care what anyone else thinks about architecture; he engages in ideological warfare only when he needs to gain acquittal in court. McGann also reads Dominique Francon's fake attempt at suicide as a real attempt. 14 Derry and Stuart Kaminsky insist on the presence of a certain pattern of imagery, in accordance with which Roark seems to ascend in the camera's eye. "Throughout the first part of the film," Kaminsky says, Dominique "is shown physically above" Roark; "only when she becomes sexually vulnerable does she appear in a lower position on the screen." According to Derry, "Throughout the movie Roark was constantly shown close to the earth.... The camera was often placed above his head, emphasizing his striving to rise." In the final sequence, Derry notes, the camera angle is reversed: Roark has conquered. 15 The truth is that the camera normally takes a level view of Roark; even in scenes in which other characters are understood as looking down on him, literally or figuratively, the lens is normally aligned to him, not them.
About the film's ideas there are many misperceptions. Richard Combs believes that Rand's script "continually declaims against the groveling mediocrity of the masses and their envious egalitarianism." But neither the script nor the direction has much to say about the "masses," their envies, or their isms; there may be more analysis of their apparent mediocrity in It's a Wonderful Life than in The Fountainhead. When mediocrity is criticized, it is mainly the mediocrity of the intellectuals and the upper classes that Rand and Vidor seem to have in mind, and that we see on the screen. Combs also claims that the script's political philosophy, which is principally vulnerable, one would think, to the charge of single-minded rationalism, actually "conflates and confuses so many political attitudes in its drive to exalt the Superman that the narrative result is a kind of Wizard of Oz nonsensicality." 16 All one can say about this is that Combs didn't like whatever movie he saw. Raymond Durgnat, a generally sympathetic analyst, also has difficulty classifying the film's ideas. Although he fails to specify any very immediate influence of Vidor's populist or mystical tendencies, he argues that "it remains unclear where Miss Rand's [ideas] end and Vidor's begin"17 -- a curious remark to make about a film whose concept was so thoroughly Rand's own.
Collaboration, of course, had to take place, and it did. Fortunately, Rand and Vidor agreed on the usefulness of a non-naturalistic technique. Rand liked expressionist film, and in her novels she found plenty of uses for the mythic and the mythological.18 The Fountainhead comes as close to mythic expressionism as a film about a rationalist architect could ever come. The mythic atmosphere is partly a matter of the directness and "urgency"19 of Rand's script, which was required to reduce a very long book to its stark fundamentals. Rand was always good with an aphorism, even in her late, tedious years, and the aphoristic style helps her here: "I don't build in order to have clients; I have clients in order to build," Roark declares--succinctly establishing himself as the archetypal creator.
But myth can never be achieved simply by collecting aphorisms. The mythic is a matter of universal problems, essential conflicts, and symbolic acts of sudden, intense significance. It is Henry Cameron (played by Henry Hull) seizing a stack of copies of the New York Banner--"the foulest newspaper on earth"--and ripping them to shreds; around him, a crowd gathers and, somewhere above, the camera inspects the scene, as if from a judgment seat. It is Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal) holding a desperate Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey) in her arms and begging him, at his hour of climactic decision, "Don't give in to them, don't give in"; then a dissolve to his boardroom, where his directors tell him, "You'd better give in"--and he gives in. And of course it is Vidor's close-up of Roark working in a stone quarry, seeming to express all the creative and destructive energy in the Randian world in the way in which he holds his drill.
In scenes like this last, of course, the director's insight into the script is more important than the script itself. Throughout the film, Vidor's camera almost unerringly selects the faces, gestures, and objects that are of real thematic or symbolic importance. He lights his sets dramatically so as to emphasize (as if emphasis were necessary) Rand's black-and-white moral contrasts, and he generally places the camera far enough from the actors to convey an impression of reserve and deep seriousness that is suitable to Rand's own seriousness.
The mythic quality of the movie, as I earlier implied, depends as much on what is left out as on what is put in. We never see Roark cooking a meal or riding a subway or going swimming. In this respect, the movie is much starker than the novel. Until the last shot, Roark is never shown working at a construction site; after he gets out of the quarry and achieves his proper station, his work is presented as if it were entirely intellectual, a triumph of mind over matter. The sets are usually stripped of everything that lacks symbolic significance. Roark's offices and the buildings that he designs seem to consist of unnaturally large, unnaturally empty rooms, as if a mythic space were being created by the clearance of all messy, mundane detail. Roark's spaces are in sharp contrast to those of villainous or equivocal people. Toohey's office has plenty of furniture and is well decorated with eighteenth-century portrait prints and a picture of Greek ruins; the boardroom in which Roark is denied a commission displays "decadent" Hubert Robert-like architectural paintings; Dominique's bedroom, a pre-Roark structure, is elaborately baroque; Wynand's pre-Roark dining room is decorated in a heavy neoclassical style and overshadowed by an immense baroque picture; on the facade of the Banner building, a metal sign hangs from Corinthian columns--the architectural banner of decadence and equivocation.
One would like to say that all aspects of script and production were adequate to the goal of mythic expressionism. Regrettably, they are not. Rand's dialogue is sometimes much too "urgent" for its own good. It's not mythic but gratingly obvious for the board of directors of the Security Bank to try to make Roark compromise by telling him, "You realize, of course, your whole future is at stake. This may be your last chance." And the expressionist sets are often not mythically stark but vacant or dull or shockingly bad. Rand failed to get Frank Lloyd Wright as designer of Roark's buildings; he wanted too much money and too much control.20 The studio's designer, Edward Carrere, took over, with fear-inspiring results. The film does well at showing the various ways in which bad architects can ruin buildings; the Cortlandt project that Roark blows up richly deserves to be blown up, as discontented mutterings from the audience normally testify. But the Cortlandt that Roark designs looks like nothing more than a typical government project. The house he builds for Wynand is even worse; it's a hard, ugly, moronic lump--something like a square space-ship filled with cement. Its principal interior embellishment is a lamp with goldfish swimming inside it, lovingly placed in the foreground by King Vidor. In general, Roark's buildings go out of their way to deny his doctrine that "form must follow function."
The film's musical decoration is slightly more successful than its architectural decoration. The score is by Max Steiner, usually regarded as one of the best Hollywood composers; he provided music for Gone with the Wind and Casablanca. Steiner's Fountainhead music tries to be romantic and sparely modern at the same time; it ends up being over-stylized and repetitive, a theme without real variation. It's simple enough to avoid serious embarrassment, however, and the final few bars provide a climax of what must be called religious feeling.
The cast, of course, is more than decoration; its members are, perhaps, Rand's most important collaborators, and it has to be said that as a group they fail to attain mythic status. One can hardly object to the presence of actors as talented as Gary Cooper, Raymond Massey, and Patricia Neal, but their talents are not necessarily in Rand's line. Only Massey is capable of realizing the compelling strangeness, the uncanniness of myth, and Massey seriously mars his performance by overacting, as Rand recognized.21 His arresting voice and manner make him, potentially, the right man for the part, and he skillfully captures the sardonic quality of Wynand's personality. But he is too often on stilts; he neglects Wynand's toughness in favor of his self-conscious theatricality. Neal overacts much more flagrantly; she plays her part with an hysterical intensity that fits the character of Dominique all too well and exaggerates the movie's expressionist style to the point of absurdity. She constantly appears to be posing for some slightly deranged portrait-painter from the days of the Weimer Republic. Her interpretation of Dominique merely deepens the mystery of why Dominique is considered a heroine.
Another mystery is Rand's curious idea that Gary Cooper was Howard Roark: "From the time she had begun writing The Fountainhead, when she had first considered the possibility that it might one day be made into a movie, Gary Cooper was the one actor she wanted for the role of Howard Roark. His physical appearance strongly suggested Roark to her; she saw him as the archetype of the American hero." 22 Like other people who have gotten their wishes, Rand lived to regret it. Cooper wasn't entirely up to the role, though not being up to it allowed him to mold Roark a little in his own attractive image, "humanizing" him, as many people have said. For examples of good acting, one should look at Cooper's sensitive treatment of Roark's shifting feelings in his scenes with Massey, or in his fine little scene or two with Ray Collins, who plays Roger Enright. (Collins, who had performed as Boss Jim W. Gettys in Citizen Kane, is himself an excellent actor, as is Jerome Cowan, perfect in the role of Alvah Scarret.) The crucial objection to Cooper is his age; he is much too old to play Roark the beginner--just as Kent Smith is much too old to play the neophyte Keating. It is very surprising that Rand thought of Smith (who does turn in a memorable performance of Keating the has-been) as the right "physical type" for his part.23 Is this the "pale, dark haired, and beautiful" Keating of the novel, the Keating who has a "classical perfection" in his looks, whose eyes are "dark, alert, intelligent?"24 Not exactly.
Surprising also is Rand's judgment that Robert Douglas, playing Toohey, "was too forceful," not "slippery and snide" enough.25 The splendidly developed Toohey of the novel is powerful as well as conniving. He is both a small, twisted figure and an immensely forceful presence. And who wrote the script in which Toohey says to Keating with disgust, "Of course I'm your friend. I'm everybody's friend. I'm a friend of humanity. Now, why did you come here? What do you want?" Rand herself made Toohey forceful, as he should be if he is to enact his prominent part in the myth. Perhaps no actor could capture Toohey's complexity, but Douglas does a striking, more-than-naturalistic job with one side of him. The fact that Rand wanted the other side to be emphasized probably reflects her embarrassment at having created a splendid villain who acts as more than a "foil" or "contrast" to the good people--the role in which her later aesthetic theory would cast a villain. 26
The major problem in The Fountainhead, however, lies not in its cast, its direction, or its production; it lies in a conflict of media. Rand's great difficulty was that of transforming a complex philosophical novel into a series of mythic scenes, scenes that nevertheless require a certain amount of philosophy if they are to be understood. The process of condensation that helps to bring the mythic elements into sharp focus also helps to deprive them of meaning. Rand was thinking of the conflict of media when she told Barbara Branden that she was "certain that it couldn't be made into a really good movie"; she had already "told the story in the proper form in the book". 27
It is this problem that makes some of the movie absurd. The romantic scenes of the book, for instance, are supposed to symbolize and develop the relations among certain complicated ideas; but the romantic scenes of the movie are just romantic scenes, rendered with an intensity that they do not seem to deserve. True, Rand is willing to compromise by getting rid of some of the sexual intensities: Dominique gets married twice, not thrice (thank God--three times would look simply terrible on film), and Roark's role in wrecking the Wynands' marriage is somewhat obscured, as McGann notes.28 But the scene of Roark's first conquest of Dominique remains, and it is a ridiculous scene. Certain elements of myth defy naturalism so boldly as to make literal versions of them appear grotesque. No one wants to see Homer's battles represented literally; no one wants to see Daphne literally transformed into a tree while she is trying to escape from Apollo. An elaborately philosophical treatment may, perhaps, demonstrate that the Roark-Dominique romance is human and explicable, but without this treatment, it looks like a dance of awkward bodies. To represent a myth is often to diminish it.
Other parts of The Fountainhead are a great deal better than the scenes to which I refer. But the ironic thing is that this "controversial" film is really not capable of stirring up much significant controversy. It can confirm and enhance pre-existing values--or, when viewed by unsympathetic audiences, it can leave these values quite untouched. But it has little power to advocate new values, because it has little ability to argue for them. Compare the laughter that usually greets the romantic scenes with the disgust usually produced by the shots of Cortlandt Homes as redesigned by Toohey's friends. Rand's script is insufficient to convince people that they ought to dislike Cortlandt: how much does the script actually say about architecture, or even about Rand's opinions on the subject? Cortlandt just looks bad. Rand's script is also insufficient to teach anyone not predisposed to such a view that Roark and Dominique's heroic love ought to be respected. It just looks bad.
Rand, we are told, arranged for the first preview of the movie to be held in a working-class community, and she was delighted by its enthusiastic reception. She felt that the audience understood all her ideas: "That's why I like the common man." Yet she herself said, "I didn't even like the script; they wanted the movie to be under two hours, so the script was too short, it wasn't right."29 So how much did her audiences understand?
The Fountainhead is not an intellectually challenging film, though it is certainly better in this respect than Rand's other efforts in the medium. Neither individualists nor anti-individualists are likely to be set thinking by an evening spent with The Fountainhead cooking in the VCR. One's knowledge that the movie intends to be challenging, yet fails, detracts from even a purely aesthetic appreciation of its technique. If easy sentiment is one danger to the art of film, unrealizable philosophic ambition is another. But at least The Fountainhead has ambition, and its ambition involves not just an attempt to present iconoclastic ideas but an attempt to affect its audience's perceptions in daring and distinctive ways. As Stuart Kaminsky says, its anti-naturalistic method makes it "one of the most noteworthy of American films... a strange and courageous effort, rather like a building by Howard Roark."30 Much of the credit goes to Rand's own strangeness and courage.
Notes
- 1 Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 253.
- 2 Leonard Spigelgass, ed., Who Wrote the Movie and What Else Did He Write? An Index of Screenwriters and Their Film Works: 1936-1969 (Los Angeles: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1970), p. 163.
- 3 Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986), p. 192.
- 4 Chris Massie, The Love Letters (New York: Random House, 1944), p. 7.
- 5 Chris Massie, The Confessions of a Vagabond (London: Sampson Low, 1931).
- 6 The Love Letters, p.33.
- 7 Ibid., p. 289.
- 8 Bosley Crowther, review of Love Letters, August 27, 1945. In The New York Times Film Reviews (New York: Times, 1970), vol. 3, p. 2078.
- 9 King Vidor, King Vidor on Film Making (New York: David McKay, 1972), pp. 231-232.
- 10 Joel Greenberg, "War, Wheat and Steel: King Vidor Interviewed," Sight And Sound, 37 (1968), p. 197.
- 11 Branden, p. 209; Stuart Kaminsky, Coop: The Life and Legend of Gary Cooper (New York: St. Martin's, 1980), p. 155.
- 12 Crowther, review of The Fountainhead, July 9, 1949. In The New York Times Film Reviews, vol. 4, p. 2346.
- 13 Charles Derry, "The Fountainhead as Film," Reason, 6 (Oct. 1974), p. 29.
- 14 Kevin McGann, "Ayn Rand in the Stockyard of the Spirit." In The Modern American Novel and the Movies, ed. Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin (New York: Ungar, 1978), pp. 331, 334.
- 15 Kaminsky, p. 157; Derry, p. 29.
- 16 Richard Combs, "King Vidor." In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: The Major Film-makers, ed. Richard Roud (New York: Viking, 1980), vol. 2, p. 1034.
- 17 Raymond Durgnat, "King Vidor" (Part 2), Film Comment, 9 (Sept.- Oct. 1973), p. 31.
- 18 John Cody, "Ayn Rand's Promethean Heroes." Reason, 5 (Nov. 1973), 30-35; Stephen Cox, "Ayn Rand: Theory versus Creative Life," Journal of Libertarian Studies, 8 (1986), p. 22.
- 19 Durgnat, p. 31.
- 20 Branden, pp. 208-209.
- 21 Ibid., p. 208.
- 22 Ibid., p. 206.
- 23 Ibid., p. 208.
- 24 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: New American Library, 1971), pp. 28-29.
- 25 Branden, p. 208.
- 26 Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (New York: World, 1969), p. 167.
- 27 Branden, op. cit., p. 185.
- 28 McGann, pp. 229-30.
- 29 Branden, pp. 211-12.
- 30 Kaminsky, p. 156.
Dr. Stephen Cox is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Among his works are Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake's Thought (University of Michigan Press; www.amazon.com), The Titanic Story (Open Court Publishing Company), and many articles and essays, such as the biographical introduction to Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine (Transaction Publishers).