Best movie of this year hands down!

One of my all time favorites.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This monumental piece of pretentious twaddle has been well served by the many excellent criticisms posted on IMDb. I cannot add to that body of work other than to point out a curious and unusual coincidence that The Fountainhead has with the 1952 remake of The Prisoner of Zenda.The definitive version of Zenda was made in 1937. It starred Ronald Colman and Madeleine Carroll along with an outstanding cast of supporting actors----including Raymond Massey as the evil Prince Michael. Better known as Black Michael, he is the principal villain in the story.We now go forward to 1949 and The Fountainhead. As noted in the cast listing, Raymond Massey appears as the newspaper publisher (a William Randolph Hearst stand in) and Robert Douglas plays the major villain in the story (Massey's newspaper architecture critic who can't abide Gary Cooper's Frank Lloyd Wright-like designs).Now we complete the circle and move on to the remake of Zenda in 1952. Remember now-- --Prince Michael was played in the original version by Raymond Massey. Who ends up acting out this character in the remake of Zenda? None other than Robert Douglas---who co- starred with Massey in The Fountainhead!I will leave it to you as to which actor gave us the better Black Michael portrayal in the two versions of Zenda. Was his scene-chewing architecture critic in The Fountainhead but a warm up for what Robert Douglas did in the remake of Zenda? It is a matter worth pondering over.

This movie should have been made 10 years later without Rand writing the screenplay and starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodword. Neale and Cooper had an affair in real life...I hope it was more steamy and natural than this stiffly-acted, miscast mess. Massey is the only performance worth writing home about. The dialog is putrid and preachy. Supposedly the audience at the premiere couldn't look Neale in the eye while exiting the theater. The critics unanimously panned it. The "hero" is selfish and most of all obnoxious and boring. Unfortunately, Cooper looked the part more than he could successfully deliver the lines. The courtroom scene was ridiculous.

The Fountainhead (1949) was released by Warner Bros. and is based on author Ayn Rand's literary masterpiece of the same name. The film stars film legend Gary Cooper as headstrong architect Howard Roark, Patricia Neal as idealist Dominique Francon, and Raymond Massey as newspaper magnate Gail Wynand. Directed by King Vidor and scored by Max Steiner, The Fountainhead is a beautiful example of Hollywood at its finest. It illustrates the cut-throat reality of real estate, architecture, and the public's insatiable appetite for tradition and otherwise mundane structures that populate their city and suburban spaces. The film begins by depicting Roark's undeserved expulsion from university. His dean proclaims him too unique and forward-thinking for the average man's traditional sensibilities and declares that Roark won't amount to much if he sticks to architecture as a profession. Roark's designs are ahead of their time: presenting sleek, unblemished lines and curves on both residential and commercial buildings that any other architect would stick Grecian accents on before calling it a day. The public and the community's builders cannot see past Roark's visionary designs to recognize the greatness and genius that undulates within each one.Howard Roark quickly becomes a starving artist because he refuses to adapt his designs to fit the mob's consensus. No one will hire him and anyone who does consider commissioning him for a job attempts to re-work his plans and incorporate more traditional accents and flourishes onto his buildings. Roark stands firm and refuses to alter his designs despite the fact this means that he is kissing his career as a successful architect goodbye. After having gone nearly two years without a single job, Roark is forced to accept a position working in a granite quarry, drilling into vast white sheets of marble to make a living. The work is laborious, tedious, and overwhelmingly exhausting, yet Roark remains stalwart and committed to performing his task to the best of his abilities. Gary Cooper excelled at playing righteous characters with strong, determined backbones and he is completely mesmerizing in the role of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.Dominique Francon (Neal) is a woman determined not to become a slave to any man or object. She is flawed, certainly, but her hesitancy to belong to any one person rings true to today's feminists and gender equality seekers. She is just as headstrong and stubborn as Howard Roark is and it's only natural that the two characters are immediately drawn to each other after spotting one another at the granite quarry. The relationship between Howard and Dominique is sultry yet damaged, tender yet violent. Dominique is a spoiled socialite but her one redeeming quality is that she recognizes talent and stays true and loyal to it as she does when she is introduced to Roark's designs and work ethic. Once Roark gets back on his feet again and is commissioned to design a luxury high-rise apartment tower in the city, his modern designs are ridiculed not by the builder who sought Roark out specifically for his architectural prowess, but by the public and their destructive criticism is egged on by one of the city's most prominent newspapers, The Banner, which is owned by Gail Wynand (Massey).Lambasted by the public, the press, and his fellow architects, Roark perseveres with his modern designs and, once completed, the apartment tower is hailed as being a truly magnificent and original piece of architecture. His critics are silenced — temporarily — and his work quickly gains popularity.Unfortunately, any man's (or woman's) climb to the top of his or her profession is rarely an easy one. The way up is paved with rejection, ridicule, dangerous temptations, and ill will — all of this causes Howard Roark, no matter how strong of a constitution he has, to stumble. His pride and his unwillingness to change result in a total professional upheaval and Roark is forced to defend himself in court, risking not only his livelihood but his professional reputation as well. Still, through thick and thin, Dominique Francon remains a constant fixture in Roark's life, defending him to the last and sticking by him in his darkest hour. She has unwittingly become a slave — the very thing she was determined to avoid — and she discovers that there is nowhere she'd rather be than in the arms of Howard Roark.The Fountainhead is a film full of elitism, pride, vanity, and defeatist attitudes. It is also one of the most beautifully shot classic black and white films I've ever seen! Its cinematography and set design hearkens back to the German expressionist masterpiece Metropolis (1927) in which the world is broken into two social classes: the workers and the elite. The Fountainhead's cinematography has an almost film noir quality about it; plenty of smoke, hard edges and clean angles, shadowy spaces, and awesomely cropped longshots. Lightness and darkness fight for screen time here and the victor is a marvellous visual blend of hard and soft modern film celluloid.The only aspect of the film that I had a slight problem with was the evident lack of chemistry between the two romantic leads (Cooper and Neal). They each portrayed their characters well, but that special, essential spark and fire was missing from the finished version of the film. Perhaps the studio, producers, and director (King Vidor) were well aware of this issue because, though Cooper and Neal were two of the story's major characters, they didn't share a large amount of screen time. Rather, the majority of their scenes were filmed separately.http://juliekinnear.com/blogs/the-fountainhead-movie

Let's face it - On the surface The Fountainhead appears to be a fairly ambitious film. But in reality the final product is nothing but a downright silly and confused adaptation of Ayn Rand's famous philosophic novel from 1943. This flick completely misses the mark on all of the book's vitality, dynamics, and character development by a country mile. The fountainhead has been stripped bare, right down to the plot's basic essentials.The Fountainhead's story spotlights in on a 'Frank Lloyd Wright'-Type architect by the name of Howard Roark and his fierce clash with the compromises of society. Roark is a defiant, inflexible man whose determination to retain his artistic integrity must be kept in his complete control at all costs, even if that means resorting to an act of destructive violence.The Fountainhead's one major flaw, and biggest disappointment, was the casting of the 50 year-old Gary Cooper to play a 25 year-old Howard Roark. Not only was that a bad decision, but the story's super-intense romance which Roark had with Dominique Francon was seriously compromised by Cooper's age, too.Roark's love-interest was played by actress Patricia Neal, a woman who was young enough to be Cooper's grand-daughter, for crying out loud. The sexual-chemistry between these 2 actors on screen was just about nil.The character of Dominique Francon was, indeed, an odd one. This woman was just plain weird from my perspective. I mean, she had the most peculiar, and annoying, way of purposely tormenting any man with whom she found herself attracted to. As far as her actions went - Instead of being pleasantly alluring and enticing, Dominique came across as being extremely repulsive. Believe me, Dominique was one mixed-up babe, that's for sure.All-In-All - The cast did what it could within the stifling limits of a plodding, heavy-handed script that was written by novelist Ayn Rand, herself.At best, The Fountainead was mediocre movie-entertainment. It should have been a whole lot more than that.