Fountainhead, The

Aroview: A touchstone movie for architects, idealists, and geniuses of any profession modelled on the career of architectural wunderkind Frank Lloyd Wright.

Taking facts but also generous liberties with Wright's story, Gary Cooper plays a maverick genius whose stubborn integrity brings him into both conflict and allegiance with an embittered newspaper magnate (Massey) and a cynical, glamorous journalist (Neal).

Its flagrant melodramatic style brandishes the struggle between individual vision and the collective establishment, a conceit that climaxes (in truest Cold War tradition) as a fully blown right-wing ideological tract. Shot in appropriate high style, while even truer to its subject, novelist Ayn Rand demanded that not a word of her script be altered.

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