Irene212

Stunningly designed by Edward Carrere (Oscar for Art Direction for "Camelot") and beautifully filmed by Robert Burks (Oscar for "To Catch a Thief"), "The Fountainhead" is a visual treat. Unfortunately, as a whole, it is a load of fatuous nonsense about the glory of an unfettered male ego. I'd leave it at that, but I'm in a mood to punish Ayn Rand the way she punished logic and morality in her original novel and this screenplay.

For starters, every character is a windbag. Raymond Massey handles the high-falutin' rhetoric quite well, even when he says he once believed "honesty was possible." It isn't? But Gary Cooper, who was about 15 years too old to play architect Howard Roark, delivers his ego-driven drivel in a monotone, culminating in this risible remark at his trial, "The great creators, the thinkers... stood alone against the men of their time. Every new thought was opposed. Every new invention was denounced." Really, Ayn? Refrigerators? The light bulb? Antibiotics? The wheel? Safety matches? Automobiles, steam engines, airplanes? Telegraph and telephone? How about moveable type and motion pictures, Ayn?

But the worst character, bar none, is socialite Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal). I ask you, has any woman every written a story with a less believable female character? Beautiful and brilliant, Dominique veers between stony frigidity ("It's the things that we admire or want that enslave us, I'm not easy to bring into submission") and bodice-ripping. You can almost see her dripping the first moment she sees Roark, all sweaty in a quarry, drilling a hole in a wall of marble-- she's the marble maiden, I get it.

Ayn Rand has been raked over the coals for decades for dreaming up Objectivism, a rare philosophy in that it was introduced in works of fiction. "A man who works for others without payment is a slave!" is one of Roark's lines (so much for volunteerism), and "The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing." Whatever that means. But this might be my favorite: "Look at history. Everything thing we have, every great achievement has come from the independent work of some independent mind." Hear that, Michelangelo, Galileo, and the Medicis? Mozart and Joseph II? Frederick II and Tycho Brahe? Gilbert and Sullivan? Orville and Wilbur? Jobs and Wozniak? "But the mind is an attribute of the individual, there is no such thing as a collective brain." Wrong on two counts. First, 'mob mentality' is a powerful example of a brain collective. Second, people working together is called collaboration.

It proved impossible to forget "Rashomon" while watching "The Outrage," because Martin Ritt's plot adheres so closely to the original 1950 Japanese film-- adheres, but ultimately turns tail and runs. The structure is the same, with the story of a rape and a murder told from the different points of view of the trio involved, with a different killer named in each version.

"The Outrage" ultimately devolves into a tale of cowardice. At one point, a fight between the rapist (Paul Newman) and the husband (Laurence Harvey) even borders on slapstick as they frantically try to avoid each other-- they even accidentally back into each other.

Kurosawa was wise enough to set his film far back in time, around the 10th century, when swords and knives were the only weapons, and all his characters are Japanese-- an approach that builds a unified picture of the deep roots of a culture that prizes honor. Martin Ritt's remake only goes back ninety years, to the 1870s, and he not only adds guns to the daggers, which fundamentally changes the way men fight, he also adds a Mexican bandit and a Native shaman to the American cast, which muddies the cultural aspect (and, given Newman's 'Frito Bandito' accent, insults Mexico).

Then there's the women. After the rape in "Rashomon," the wife's dishonor brings burning shame to her husband, the samurai warrior, a reaction which revives the fighting spirit she showed with the rape. But in "The Outrage," the wife (Claire Bloom) is said to be "a slut, poor white trash," flirting with anything in pants. "Hallelujah in the honeysuckle," her husband snarls at her, having been ready to dump her long before this outrage. In both movies, the women set the two men against each other, but only in "Rashomon" is it plausible.

Edward G. Robinson does a lot of laughing as the cynical con man who hears all the versions from two men who were at the trial, a preacher (William Shatner) and a prospector (Howard Da Silva). They talk about men and women, good and evil, but all their cracker-barrel philosophy is undermined by the muddled morality. James Wong Howe's photography of the groves of saguaro cacti around Tucson is a worthy successor to Kazuo Miyagawa's luminous work with forest landscapes and heavy rain in "Rashomon," but "The Outrage" is otherwise a failed imitation.

Not one scene in "Rashomon" takes place indoors. To expose the fundamentally selfish nature of man, Kurosawa even makes a 'courtroom' out of an open expanse of gravel before a low wall. The only structure is the ruin of a temple being used as a shelter from heavy rain by a monk (Minoru Chaiki) and an aging woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) who is returning from a murder trial. A third man (Kichijiro Ueda) joins them and builds a fire, then asks to hear the story of the trial, which is famously told in flashbacks from three points of view, in which all three confess to the murder: the bandit on trial, Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune); the samurai's wife (Machiko Kyo), who was raped by Tajomaru; and, through a witch-like Shinto medium, her dead husband, the samurai Kanazawa (Masayuki Mori) claims he committed suicide.

So many aspects of human behavior are examined that it would be impossible to analyze the film in one review. Let me just focus on the moment-- and especially the music-- when the bandit decides that he will have the woman, one way or another. At the trial, he says, "It was a hot afternoon. Suddenly a cool breeze rustled the leaves. If it hadn't been for that wind, I wouldn't have killed him.... But if I could have her without killing, all the better." Then, in flashback, we see him sleeping against an enormous tree trunk as the samurai approaches with his wife on horseback. He wakes up, sees her, and Kurosawa signals his arousal through sudden change in music and the handling of his sword. Fierce fighting ensues, amid pastoral scenes of the wife sitting quietly beside a stream, waiting. But her role is far from passive. When I referred to the "fundamentally selfish nature of man," I was by no means excluding woman.

The movie ends as the rains end, with the three men who sought shelter suddenly hear a baby crying. An infant has been abandoned in another part of the ruin, and the child becomes the fulcrum on which the film's philosophy of man's goodness depends.