Review of The Fountainhead (1949) by Christopher S — 24 Jan 2011

Director King Vidor has certainly crafted a great-looking film, but even the excellent art direction and cinematography, and the wonderful Patricia Neal at her most stunning can't overcome a truly awful screenplay by Ayn Rand (adapting her novel, she demanded total creative control), populated by one-dimensional characters (the woefully miscast Gary Cooper, in particular, is a bland cypher) and laughably on-the-nose dialogue, it effectively turns the whole film into a screeching, preachy melodrama more far more concerned with pushing Rand's ideologies than telling a compelling story about believable characters.