[From Luc Moullet’s monograph King Vidor’s The Fountainhead (2009, Yellow Now). See Table of Contents]
In the United States
The reception of the film by the American press was negative.
Variety (24/6/1949) found the film “cold, unemotional, talkative,” and lamented the overacting: “Underplaying would have served the story better.” The choice of Cooper was deemed “a casting error. Neal is a whimsical heroine. She hasn’t adapted herself to the demands of the screen.” The implication is that she’s just a stage actress.
For Harrison’s Reports (2/7/1949), “the characters are unreal. The subject is a series of digressions,” there is “a whole philosophical salad that average people don’t understand; […] motivations get lost in a maze of blur.”
In the New York Times (9/7/1949), the famous Bosley Crowther, the Ellsworth Toohey of cinema, who called the shots at the time, found the right catchphrase: “A picture you don’t even have to see to disbelieve.” About the explosion, he concluded: “If all were excused such transgressions, then society would indeed be in peril! … high-priced twaddle we haven’t seen for a long, long time.” Roark’s buildings, “from what we see of it, is trash.” The story is “a complex of bickering and badgering among these cheerless folk.”
Easy prejudices, all the more so as Patricia Neal plays mainly with her eyes, which doesn’t belong as much in the theatre, given the distance of the audience. And Cooper was typecast by the critics as a cowboy, although he had already played, in Peter Ibbetson, an architect quite similar to Roark.
Archer Winsten of the New York Post even declared that “intellectually, Vidor is a simpleton.”
The American critics of the time were confined to their own small domain. They knew nothing about architecture and not much about literature. They hadn’t read the novel: eighteen hours of reading…
They were known for their mediocrity and had castigated many great films, Under Capricorn, On Dangerous Ground, Good Sam, Moonfleet etc…
The paradox is that The Fountainhead is a very American film in its search for effects. The opposite of a Mizoguchi, a champion of whittling, who seeks to conceal all effects, Vidor offers them to be seen full screen. If only one film from the whole of Hollywood production had to be preserved, it would be this one. It is so Hollywoodish that it seems to become a caricature of it, which is what the critics must have felt.
It was a rather expensive film (four times the budget of Ruby Gentry), and it made a loss (about $2,100,000 in revenue against a cost of $2,511,000, not including the cost of prints). This is hardly less than the $3,100,000 of epics such as Samson and Delilah or Land of the Pharaohs.
According to Warner and Ayn Rand, the film worked better with the middle classes, and in the suburbs, than with the intellectuals, whom it was principally intended for.
This commercial failure explains Vidor’s reservations about The Fountainhead. In Hollywood, it was in a filmmaker’s interests to not defend one of his children that did not please the public. The producers accepted quite readily that a director could have a failure—one, but not two or three in a row. You can’t always get it right. But you couldn’t transgress the old adage: “The public is never wrong.” And a mea culpa was always welcome in these puritanical lands…
Vidor does not say a word about The Fountainhead in his autobiography. As mentioned earlier, he may have preferred casting Bogart over Cooper. But when I met him, I began to enthusiastically defend the choice of Cooper, and he told me then that I was probably right. It’s hard to prove your interviewer wrong when he says a lot of good things about your work. And in life, King Vidor was a quiet, awkward, welcoming man, a kind of good, diligent student. Just the opposite of his films. In contrast, his French counterpart Abel Gance was really at one with his work, Vidor was inclined to sort things out rather than get into conflict all the time. He was successful in life and work, and had no need to court controversy.
The only point on which he objected to the film for a very long time was the final explosion.
It’s true that it can be a good tactic for a director to speak ill of one of his films, at least in interviews given long after its theatrical release. The interlocutor will be embarrassed, and will tend to reassure such a modest filmmaker. This is a welcome change from all those directors who think of their new-borns as the greatest of masterpieces. I have sometimes practised this method myself, with success.
The end of The Fountainhead is perhaps stupid and ridiculous, as Vidor said in 1962, especially since no architect in the world, to my knowledge, has practised this kind of dynamiting. But it fits perfectly into a work that is not based on plausibility. There is a bigger-than-life aspect to this film.
Let’s not pay too much heed to the author’s word, even and especially if he is great. Pialat, Ulmer, Losey, DeMille, Lara have said a lot of stupid things about their films too. Vidor defended Grease and Monicelli’s Proibito. And let’s not forget—in times when there are many interviews—that it’s boring to always say (or even to think) the same thing. I have experienced this.
More recently, Vidor has begun an about-face: “I don’t want to advocate destruction as a means of enforcing an artist’s integrity. But it’s part of his work. It has been said that sometimes destruction is just a new construction, two sides of the same thing.”[1]
At the end of his life, a little disillusioned by his forced retirement, he even declared: “At the time the film was made, I felt that the hero’s gesture was excessive, I’m not so sure about that today.”[2]
(more…)
The Seventh Art 
