The famous scene where Patricia Neal admires Gary Cooper’s, ahem, jackhammer.

While there have always been powerful, well-connected fans of Ayn Rand like Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan, something about her ideas appeals, not necessarily to the weak, but to outsiders, to failures, to losers and malcontents, among whom, of course, I number myself. If society rejects me, it feels a lot better to fool myself into thinking I’m a misunderstood genius than it does to face the harsh reality that I’m physically unattractive or lack social skills. There are, of course, physically unattractive, misunderstood geniuses who lack social skills, but they are far more likely to become poets or novelists than film directors or architects. Anybody who can somehow make it back to his apartment drunk off his ass and write a few lines of poetry can imagine that he might someday be the next Charles Bukowski. To be even a bad architect or a bad film director, however, takes other people. You need actors, construction workers, building inspectors, sound engineers, and most importantly of all, people with money to back your project, or you’ll never really make it past the stage of “impractical dreamer.”

King Vidor, who adapted Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, was not a bad filmmaker. On the contrary, he’s one of the greatest directors American cinema has ever produced. One look at the famous opening of his silent masterpiece The Crowd will make it obvious just how much later directors like Orson Welles owed to his pioneering genius. Vidor, however, was also a rebel and a malcontent, whose self-produced film Our Daily Bread, flopped at the box office. Even though Our Daily Bread was a solidly leftist, even socialist film, Vidor ended his career as a reactionary and an anti-communist, a member of Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. The Hollywood studio bosses and the critical establishment which rejected Our Daily Bread lurched sharply to the left under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Vidor, in the aggrieved, contrarian manner every genuine loser and malcontent understands, did just the opposite. He turned to the right. What better director, therefore, to adapt Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead to the big screen?

Vidor’s adaptation of The Fountainhead has long divided critical opinion. While some people appreciate the acting of Gary Cooper and especially Patricia Neal in the roles of Howard Rourk and Dominique Francon, or the magnificent, and completely artificial – according to its IDMB entry there are no “on location” shoots in The Fountainhead – sets of New York City designed by its art director Edward Carrere, other people find the dialog ludicrous, Gary Cooper miscast and too old, and the movie’s politics a thinly veiled apology for fascism. Ayn Rand herself, even though she was heavily involved in its production, hated it so much that she refused to allow Hollywood to film an adaption of her later novel Atlas Shrugs. Her grievances seem to have been mainly centered on the way the adaptation edited down Howard Rourk’s final speech to under eight minutes. I come down firmly on the side of “it’s a great film.” It’s not because I agree with Rand’s or Vidor’s politics. On the contrary, I’m a Marxist and a collectivist who thinks the only thing that can save humanity from itself is communist revolution. It’s not because the film appeals to me as a contrarian and a malcontent. While I can certainly appreciate the twenty-two-year-old Patricia Neal lusting for Gary Cooper’s flaccid old dick in the famous granite quarry scene, I find Howard Rourk and Dominique Francon both such irritating characters that if they existed in real life — and I got to live out my fantasy of being Joseph Stalin — I’d send them both right to the Gulag. The short answer to why I think The Fountainhead is a great film is that it’s a magnificent triumph of form over content. Let me briefly summarize the plot then give you the long answer.

The Fountainhead opens with Howard Rourk, the forty-seven-year-old Gary Cooper, being expelled from a university that looks a bit like Princeton. The reason he’s being expelled is probably a first, at least for the Princeton of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Albert Einstein. He’s too individualistic. He won’t design buildings to please the public. He’s got too much integrity. After leaving the university, Rourk finds a mentor, and soulmate, in the form of Henry Cameron, another maverick architect played by Henry Hull. Cameron, who may be an individualist, but who certainly can’t be described as a “rugged” individualist, eventually breaks down in despair over his lack of clients, and warns Rourk to take the easy way out and conform. Forget about modern architecture, he cries in anguish. Give the people the trash that they want. Rourk, who’s rugged as well as an individualist, assures Cameron that far from giving in, he’ll carry on his legacy, but soon runs into the same problems. He can’t find any clients. We soon see why. While the local tabloid, “The Banner,” is owned by the honorable, but flawed, Gail Wynand – the sexually ambiguous first name is no accident – the newspapers domineering spirit is a man named Ellsworth M. Toohey. Rand was no Dickens but she could occasionally come up with an amusing name. Toohey, who smokes a cigarette in a holder – shades of Franklin Roosevelt? – is not only a dedicated collectivist, he’s basically Satan. He wants to control and then break Rourke, who he recognizes as a man of integrity, through his control of the stupid mob, the uneducated masses easily manipulated by tabloids like The Banner. Rourke, of course, is too strong to be intimidated by Toohey. When he runs out of clients, and money, he not only refuses to take a loan from his old classmate Peter Keating – a fashionable architect and caricature of the conformist who gets along by going along – he takes a job as a day laborer in a granite quarry.

While Ayn Rand and King Vidor may have been conservatives, and while Cooper may have been too old to play the twenty-five-year-old Howard Rourk, the sections of The Fountainhead that take place in the granite quarry works perfectly, almost in spite of itself. When Patricia Neal, a bourgeois “lady” in her fashionable clothes, comes to the quarry and observes the tall, muscular Cooper, who looks exactly like an idealized proletarian superman from Soviet mural, it’s a miniature Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ayn Rand, like D.H. Lawrence, worshiped dick, as you can plainly see by the way Neal looks at Cooper as he applies a jackhammer to a wall of granite. Howard Rourke eventually gets a commission to build a skyscraper for an eccentric millionaire named Roger Enright, but doesn’t leave before he and Dominique Francon have a round of hot prole on bourgeoisie, and pretty explicitly rapey, sex in her father’s summer home. The Enright Building is, of course, a success. Rourk, who’s modeled on Rand’s hero Frank Lloyd Wright is a genius. After he and Francon meet for a second time at the Enright Building’s opening day party – for some odd reason she never asked him his name at the quarry – they get better acquainted. Rourk isn’t an uneducated day laborer at all, but a fellow bourgeoisie. Ellsworth M. Toohey, more determined than every before to destroy Howard Rourke, persuades Gail Wynand, who’s too busy pining after Dominique Francon to pay much attention to anything, to enlist The Banner in a smear campaign against modern architecture. The stupid masses, being stupid masses, are easily manipulated into rejecting the Enright Building’s pioneering design, and once again, Rourk finds himself without any clients. Dominique Francon, still pining for Howard Rourke’s Chrysler Building of a penis, resigns from The Banner in protest.

Rourk, the ruggedest of rugged individualists, works his way back, taking any small commission in any out of the way place from anybody who will let him design buildings, not for the public, but for himself. Eventually Gail Wynand, who in the intervening years has successfully bullied Dominique Francon into marrying him, commissions Rourk to build a dream house for his wife, who’s never loved him. Wynand, who’s long forgotten about the smear campaign that destroyed Rourk’s career, has enough taste to know he’s the man for the job. What he doesn’t realize is that Rourke’s already slept with his wife, and that the house, once built, might be, for lack of a better term, called The Cuck Palace. Wynand, who’s played in an almost catatonic manner by Raymond Massey, is not only a rich man trying to buy his way into his trophy bride’s heart. He’s probably a closeted homosexual who wants the Howard Rourk dick as badly as his wife does, but can’t admit it to himself. Eventually he and Rourk become good friends, recognizing each other as fellow men of integrity, and the not so subtle shift in the balance of power excites Dominique Francon like she’s never been excited before. Who will she choose? Raymond Massey or Gary Cooper? Of course she chooses Rourke. When Peter Keating, Rourk’s light-weight old “friend” from the university, once a fashionable architect but now down on his luck, manages to convince the all powerful Ellsworth M. Toohey, who by this point is as much Robert Moses as he is Franklin Roosevelt, into letting him design a gigantic new public housing project, and finding himself in over his head, he manages to convince Rourke to do it for him. Rourk, uncharacteristically agrees, but only on one condition, that his design be accepted as is with no changes.

Note: Ayn Rand seems to have anticipated the way blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters would use “fronts” during the McCarthyite 1950s, only here the victim isn’t a communist screenwriter but a libertarian superman persecuted by the stupid masses.

Rourke’s design for the housing project is, of course, a triumph. There’s really nothing Howard Rourk can’t do. Unfortunately, however, he decides to go on a long, slow cruise with his friend – gay lover? – Gail Wynand and is unavailable to advise Peter Keating when Ellsworth Toohey hires assistant architects to make a mess of Rourk’s original design. When Rourke returns to the city, he’s aghast, but unlike with Toohey’s previous attempts to reduce him to submission, he can’t just quit and walk out. Keating has already agreed to the modifications, and the housing project is already going up. The only solution left is to become, if not a terrorist, then at least a vandal on an epic scale, so he rigs the construction site with dynamite and blows the housing project to kingdom come. Rourke doesn’t mind if poor people get to live in his magnificent creation, but he does mind if mediocrities make changes to his “art.” It’s really not difficult to see the connection here between the architect and the screenwriter, more specifically, to Ayn Rand herself, who hated the idea, even of minor editing to bring one of her turgid speeches down to manageable proportions.

The trial itself, which seems besides the point since the police have found Rourk on the site of the construction site after the explosions, serves mainly to give Gail Wynand the opportunity to redeem, then disgrace himself in his wife’s eyes, initially throwing The Banner behind Rourk’s defense, then backing down after the paper’s shareholders threaten to pull out. Rourk’s long speech on the differences between the creator and the parasite so moves the jury that they nullify the charges, and Rourk, although he actually confesses during the trial to having blown up the housing project, walks free. Gail Wynand, who now admits that Rourk deserves possession of Dominique Francon, has only two more things to do. First he commissions Rourke to build the “Wynand Building,” the tallest skyscraper in New York, then he blows his brains out. The last scene in the film, with Francon riding a service operator to the top of Rourk’s creation, is the fulfillment of the scene in the quarry when she first sees Rourk with the jackhammer, an ode to the biggest dick in the world, not the Wynand Building, but the thing hanging between Howard Rourk’s legs.

The opening scene of King Vidor’s film The Crowd. Note how the Equitable Building eventually becomes a model.

The scene from The Fountainhead, where Gary Cooper takes his broken mentor to the hospital. Note the Equitable Building in the window of the ambulance, Vidor’s subtle allusion to the earlier film. The Fountainhead’s Henry Cameron, like the crowd’s John Sims, is overwhelmed by the scale and power of the city, only in the Fountainhead, unlike in The Crowd, Vidor celebrates the great machine that breaks the insignificant little man.

So why does so obviously stupid a film work?

I would argue that it’s not in spite of but because of Rand’s insipid script. The Fountainhead’s characters are so badly written and so difficult to connect with that we eventually ignore them, and they fade into the wonderfully designed sets. King Vidor, who decades earlier had directed The Crowd, easily one of the greatest movies of the 1920s, has brought some of the magic of the late silent film back into the theater. Indeed, it’s possible to look at The Fountainhead as the true sequel to The Crowd that Our Daily Bread tried, and failed to become. Where Our Daily Bread focused on the redemption through collectivism of The Crowd’s hero, an anonymous little man crushed by the weight of the modern city, The Fountainhead celebrates the great city that crushed him. Vidor probably didn’t intend it to turn out that way any more than George Lucas wanted so many people to find his evil empire, those magnificent star destroyers and death stars, to be the coolest thing about the Star Wars franchise, but that’s what’s on the screen. Nothing in The Crowd quite lived up to the great opening scene where Vidor’s camera pans up the side of the Equitable Building in lower Manhattan until it’s transformed into something so much larger than anything on the human scale that it becomes a model, but that scene is completely fulfilled in The Fountainhead. Everything about the film, the lighting, the shadow, the “deep focus” borrowed from Citizen Kane, the out sized offices and apartments, serves to diminish the people that inhabit it. Indeed, even Howard Rourke is subordinated in the famous ending – you should never shoot a middle-aged man from below lest you reveal his saggy chin – in favor of his creation. In the end The Fountainhead is pure cinema, a film, not about Howard Rourk, but about the beauty of the Manhattan skyline, perhaps the greatest film ever made about the impersonally vast, aesthetically overwhelming machine that is New York City.

On the night of August 6, 1974, a 24-year-old Frenchman named Philippe Petit and a group of friends rigged a series of steel cables between two towers of the World Trade Center. When the sun came up the next morning on August 7, Petit climbed out onto the cable and did a death-defying, forty-five minute hire-wire act 1350 feet above the streets of lower-Manhattan before the rain finally forced him to come inside. Petit’s walk, which is sometimes credited with redeeming the World Trade Center in the eyes of most New Yorkers, has already been the subject of one film, the acclaimed Man on a Wire. Since most of the images of the real Philippe in the act of walking between the World Trade Center are still photos, however, the story was ripe for a semi-fictional dramatization.

The Walk, which was directed by Forrest Gump’s Robert Zemeckis, somehow manages to be both a great film and a terrible film. The critical consensus, that The Walk has a great second half marred by a dull first half and a terrible performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, misses the point. Yes, Levitt hams it up with a fake French accent, which some dialect coaches argue is perfectly authentic, but fake French accents, as we’ve learned from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, are fun. If you’re an American pretending to be a Frenchman, you’d might as well give it the whole Pepe Le Pew. Levitt, while clearly a man in his thirties and not a twenty-four-year-old, manages to project the kind of athleticism you wold expect from a man who could walk for forty-five minutes on a steel cable suspended 1350 feet in the air. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is not a problem. He’s an asset. The first half of The Walk isn’t inspired cinema, but it serves its purpose. Petit learned how to wire walk when he was sixteen. He walked the between World Trade Center Number One and World Trade Center Number Two when he was twenty-four. That’s not a lot of time, as the opening of the film makes clear.

The problem with The Walk isn’t Joseph Gordon-Levitt or the uninspired opening in Paris. It’s that the film is more libertarian than anarchist. As you might expect from the right-wing Robert Zemeckis – Forrest Gump was a dreadful piece of reactionary propaganda – the spirit that presides over The Walk is not Peter Kropotkin but Ayn Rand. Part of the fun of a good heist film is watching how a team of conspirators cases the target, cracks their security code, then comes together and pulls off the job. When Jean-Pierre Melville, who actually called himself a right-wing anarchist, made Le Cercle Rouge and Bob le flambeur, he knew what teamwork looked like. The Walk — which purports to be a heist movie about a fun loving group of anarchists who come together to pull off “the coup” of infiltrating the security of the World Trade Center — is mainly about the need to respect the superman and get out of his way. Indeed, in Zemeckis’ imagination, Petit’s team, which includes a stereotypical, dumb American stoner and Jeff, a French math nerd who’s terrified of heights, is almost worse than useless.

Jeff in fact becomes the The Walk’s surrogate for its audience. Don’t get me wrong, the second half of The Walk is filmed with so much skill I literally had to turn it off several times to recover my composure. There are reports of people getting vertigo and throwing up  during its original theatrical run in New York. If you’re afraid of heights, don’t see The Walk, even at home. The problem is that a good film would have put us in the shoes of Philippe Petit, not his useless assistant. Instead of letting us share the hero’s triumph, The Walk reduces us to terrified spectators. Zemeckis doesn’t liberate us. He manipulates us.

That’s too bad because, in spite of everything, I still think The Walk is the best film ever made about the World Trade Center, and, in some ways, the best film ever made about 9/11. As we watch Petit walk from tower to tower, turn around, then walk back again, it’s impossible not to think about people who chose to fall to their deaths rather than be burned alive. Indeed, the most terrifying thing about The Wire is how vividly it drives home the idea of being stuck 1350 feet above ground with no chance of being rescued. The police are not only useless. They almost get Petit killed. An NYPD helicopter buzzes him overhead. Police officers reach out their hands to “rescue” him in such an absurd manner we half suspect that the reason he stayed on the wire for so long was because he was afraid that some fool of New York City cop would get in his way. He solves that problem by tossing them his balancing pole, which knocks them to the ground long enough for him to jump back onto the roof to safety, and to his arrest. The second half of The Walk is brilliantly done, but it’s really not much fun. We share none of Petit’s exhilaration. The longer The Walk goes on, the more we want it to end, for Petit to get the hell off the roof before he has an attack of nerves, falls and ends up a smashed pile of flesh and bones on the sidewalk below. While Petit is dancing in the sky like an aerial John Galt, we become, in effect, the cops, ordinary people without the courage or the imagination to do anything so inspired.

At the end of The Walk, Petit tells us that the director of the World Trade Center gave him lifetime pass to the observation deck. We can’t help but reflect on how Petit is still very much alive, but that the World Trade Center is gone. We remember the people who died with it.

Before there was Sansho the Bailiff, Wages of Fear, Army of Shadows, A Man Escaped, Sullivan’s Travels or Twelve Years a Slave, there was I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Based on the autobiography of Robert Elliott Burns, a New Jersey man who escaped from a Georgia penal institution, not once, but twice, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is one of the first, and still one of the best, films to explore the prison industrial complex, the essentially fascist nature of capitalism, and the meaning of “freedom.” It also had a direct influence on the politics of the early 1930. Its success not only made it possible for the Governor of New Jersey to refuse to extradite Burns to Georgia, it provoked a retaliatory lawsuit by the Georgia chain gang warden J. Harold Hardy against Warner Brothers for “vicious, brutal and false attacks.”

And thus begins a second drama that rivals the one recounted in his book. Warden J. Harold Hardy of the Troup County chain gang – a prominent character in this book – and Troup County police Chief R. B. Carter went to New Jersey to take Burns back to Georgia after extradition. However, New Jersey Governor A. Harry Moore received hundreds of telegrams and letters, including one representing the 800 members of the Fourteenth Engineers Veterans’ Association, Burns’ old outfit, opposing extradition. All this outpouring of support was a result of the media coverage Burns received at the time and the overwhelming popularity of his story, both the book and the film.

http://www.oocities.org/marulaslair/legacy1.html

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang begins with Sergeant James Allen, played by the seminal American actor Paul Muni, returning to his hometown from the western front of the First World War. His older brother, a Protestant minister, advises him to go back to his old job as a clerk in the local shoe factory, but Allen has other plans. Having learned civil engineering in the army, he wants to start over again in the construction industry. So he hits the road, running squarely into the deep, and pretty much forgotten recession that hit the United States following the First World War. Allen’s brother was right. Jobs aren’t easy to come by when you’re competing against over a million demobilized soldiers. He should have taken his old job back, and sat tight until the recession was over. Soon he’s one of many unemployed hobos wandering through America looking for work.

Allen refused his old job at the shoe factory because his experience in the army had taught him to dislike regimentation. He has no idea what’s coming. When a fellow hobo invites the hungry Allen out for a hamburger, he enthusiastically tags along, only to realize, to his horror, that he’s been tricked into participating in an armed robbery. Of course the police, who arrive quickly on scene, don’t believe his story of having only come along for the hamburger, especially when he panics and tries to run. Sentenced to ten years hard labor on a George chain gang, where the food is barely edible, and where torture is regularly to motivate prisoners who can’t take the brutal sixteen-hour work days, he begins to long for his former life as an unemployed bum. Allen quickly realizes that if he doesn’t escape soon, the regimentation and the bad food will begin to feel normal, that his life will essentially be over. Against all odds, and with the help of his fellow prisoners, one African American, he manages to bend the cuffs of his chain far enough to slip out and “take it on the lamb.” One of the most radical things about I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is the way Allen’s fellow prisoners are not only racially diverse, but capable of solidarity. They’re not depraved criminals so much as proletarians trapped inside an essentially fascist capitalism.

Note: Yes, they could have, and probably should, have made the black prisoner who helps Allen break his chains the real star of the film, but that would have been another movie, 12 Years a Slave to be precise.

James Allen’s escape from the Georgia chain gang to Chicago not only holds up as a nail biting thriller,  it’s probably better than most films being released today. It’s certainly better than the overrated The Fugitive from the 1990s. Just about the only film that puts us so squarely in the shoes of a man trying against all odds to get away from his captors is Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. Watch both films consecutively to compare the revolutionary potential of Pre-Code Hollywood and the French New Wave. Bresson would never cast an actor as expressive as Paul Muni, but they’re not as different as you might think. Allen’s success in Chicago under an assumed name – he finally gets that job in construction he wanted so badly and eventually rises to become superintendent of a construction site – is overshadowed by Marie, a jealous, resentful woman who finds out about his real identity and uses it to blackmail him into marrying her. The misogynistic portrayal of Marie is perhaps the film’s biggest weak point – it’s just the “woman scorned” cliche – but there is a point behind it. Under capitalism, even a comfortable member of the bourgeoisie, which Allen has now become, isn’t genuinely free. Alienated from ourselves, and from our fellow suffering humans, every man still back on the chain gang in Georgia, we are still regimented. It’s a kinder, gentler, far more comfortable variety of slavery, but it’s slavery none the less. So when Allen meets Helen, the woman of his dreams – actually she’s as much of a card board cutout as his wife – he attempts to convince Marie to give him a divorce, and she rats him out to the police, who are still on his trail after all those years.

James Allen is once again a prisoner of the state. Released from the necessity to live under an assumed name, however, and as a prominent bourgeoisie with access to the media, he can now agitate for his fellow prisoners back in Georgia, and against the prison industrial complex in general. Without a revolutionary movement behind him, however, James Allen is doomed. The governor of Georgia, which promises him a full pardon if he goes back and serves another ninety days, goes back on his word. Of course he does. We all know he will, and it’s almost unbearable to watch Allen reject the advice of his lawyer and take the deal. Did Allen really believe he was ever going to get out of that prison system once they tricked him back inside? His second round of incarceration is, if anything, even worse than the first, not only because his fellow prisoners no longer respect him – they rightfully think he’s an idiot – but because he places his “hope,” not in outright rebellion, but in the idea that “the system” might be fair. So he waits, and waits, and waits while his “pardon” is pushed back further and further, first ninety days, then a year, then indefinitely. It’s only when he loses all hope that the state of Georgia will ever release him that he regains his ability to act, and by that time it’s too late. He’s crossed the line from rebel over to hardened criminal.

It’s interesting to speculate on the potential of “Pro-Code” Hollywood, that short era between the advent of “talkies” and the introduction of the “Production Code” in 1934, those three or four years when Hollywood was not only putting out sophisticated romantic comedies like Gold Diggers of 1933 and Flying Down to Rio, but “social justice” films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. American cinema might have become as revolutionary as the Soviet Cinema of the 1920s, or the French New Wave. Alas though, the puritan scolds of the Republican Party and the Catholic Church saw what they were up against and put a stop to it. Indeed, few Americans realize that between 1934 and 1968, American cinema was subject to a regime of censorship that was as strict as anything in the “free world.” When the Production Code finally started to break down in the 1960s, the result was more “Bonnie and Clyde” than I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, coarse violent exploitation rather than a profound meditation on the nature of freedom, capitalism and the prison industrial complex.