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King Vidor - The Fountainhead (1949)

Posted By: newland

Date: 18 Apr 2009 20:39:28

King Vidor – The Fountainhead (1949)
DVDrip | English | Subtitles: EN, FR, ES (optional) | 1:52:34 | 640x480 | H264 | NTSC 23.97fps | Audio: MP3 - 160kbps | 1.44 GB

Individualistic and idealistic architect Howard Roark is expelled from college because his designs fail to fit with existing architectural thinking. He seems unemployable but finally lands a job with like-minded Henry Cameron, however within a few years Cameron drinks himself to death, warning Roark that the same fate awaits unless he compromises his ideals. Roark is determined to retain his artistic integrity at all costs.

Although Hollywood is finally breaking new ground it doesn't make films like this anymore… and aside from The Fountainhead, truly never did. Looking back today, I found it such a refreshing and unique change. — Gary W. Tooze, DVD Beaver

King Vidor réalise avec "Le Rebelle" (The Fountainhead) le film le plus emblématique de ses préoccupations de cinéaste. — Olivier Bitoun, DVD Classik

One of the more misunderstood and unjustly maligned films in Hollywood history; King Vidor's 1949 thematically authoritative "The Fountainhead" was unable to shift many perceptions and find acceptance for its "expressionist fable" qualities. This derivation from usual Hollywood fare of the 40's required a much higher level of suspension of disbelief, one that the audience of the day were unwilling to respond with. It reached top spots on many of the worst film lists of that year with novelist and screenwriter Ayn Rand's deep and unbound dialogue helping to vault her philosophy known as 'Objectivism' (a cerebral anthem for day-to-day existence) into the more mainstream public eye. Intellectuals of the day expectantly applauded it, the bulk of society dismissed its melodrama and misunderstood its profound messages. — Gary W. Tooze, DVD Beaver

The Fountainhead is a visual masterpiece. Director King Vidor interprets Rand's intellectual ideas with complimentary images of power and vitality not seen since the days of silent expressionism. Rand's barrage of propaganda-like position speeches are reinforced by visual dynamics that would leave Leni Riefenstahl breathless with envy: Not one second of the film reminds us of real people living in a recognizable world, and Ayn Rand's one-sided tirades and disturbing rhetoric have to be heard to be believed: "The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing." But the picture is weirdly fascinating.
(…) The Fountainhead is an emotionally powerful piece of cinematic insanity, a movie that bears careful watching yet elicits gales of laughter when shown at festivals and revivals. Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal's overheated, intellectually perverse romance is undeniably entertaining, and a good match for Ayn Rand's personal 'take no prisoners' approach to life and love. It is said that Rand once initiated an affair with her best friend's husband by simply announcing to them both, up front, that she wanted him and that the affair was going to happen. The characters of The Fountainhead continually express their deepest inner needs, and without the slightest restraint. — Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant

The Fountainhead advocates artistic individualism to its logical conclusion, imbuing its protagonists with the solipsism of modernist architecture, such that the ultimate impression is of buildings conversing and, more specifically, of the interaction between a fortress (Gary Cooper), a temple (Patricia Neal), and a series of bland bureaucratic structures. In doing so, it explicates modernist architecture's rejection of both functionality and ornament as the hallmark of a sublime so pure that its final aim is to remove all people, and humanity, from the cityscape - at least at street level, which is persistently identified as the end-point of a suicidal trajectory - as if set in a giant art gallery, preoccupied with the individual construction and experience of art, but populated with a cast of entirely blind characters. For this reason, Edward Carrere's magnificent art direction drastically overshadows Ayn Rand's script, which is laughably one-dimensional and, in some ways, unnecessary, given that the one vestige of individuation allowed to (partly) supervene the protagonists' artistic products is their voracious sex drives, which are deflected into a series of tableaux whose primivitism recalls silent cinema, and repeatedly gesture towards the masochistic pleasures of deindividuation, or at least of total identification with an external, inanimate object. This, in turn, undermines Rand's pervasive identification of objectivism and high capitalism, or at least draws a common denominator between the latter and both fascism and communism, that almost requires her propagandistic script to conceal it, as well as Cooper's strained, word-by-word delivery, which also clarifies that his peculiar ability to fuse grace and earthiness into an embodiment of conversion was always an objectivist one, as evinced in his own, brief conversion to objectivism during production. — Billy Stevenson, A Film Canon

King Vidor réalise avec "Le Rebelle" (The Fountainhead) le film le plus emblématique de ses préoccupations de cinéaste. Lui qui a souvent filmé l’affrontement entre le passé et le futur, la quête de l’absolu et l’individualisme, dont il était le chantre inconditionnel ("Seule la puissance de l’expression individuelle peut continuer à justifier le cinéma" disait-il), trouve dans le roman d’Ayn Rand un sujet à même de magnifier ses thèmes. Ayn Rand écrit The Fountainhead en 1938, roman qui devient un énorme succès de librairie. Hollywood la courtise durant dix ans jusqu’à ce qu’elle accepte de porter elle-même son roman à l’écran en s’assurant d’avoir la mainmise sur le film. Dans The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand défend "l’objectivisme", une philosophie qui refuse toute compromission, fut-elle en faveur d’une avancée sociale. Individualiste forcenée, militante de droite qui prend fait et cause pour le sénateur MacCarthy (qui ne cesse à l’époque de fustiger le gouvernement fédéral) Ayn Rand est, malgré sa popularité, une personnalité explosive. Mais la Warner est convaincue que ce best-seller ne peut que devenir un succès du box-office, alors que le film lui-même, qui pourfend la marchandisation de l’art et le rejet de la vox populi, contient en germe son presque inévitable échec public. — Olivier Bitoun, DVD Classik