[FreeKeys]

the film version of 'The Fountainhead' is an absolutely laughable failure.
-- You forgot to add the customary "IMAO" after that one.

Well, I liked it, and it was considered a box-office success at the time:

"...helped place Vidor once more in the front rank of Hollywood directors. His film The Fountainhead (1949) only solidified his reputation as a stylist, with its audacious (and stunning) visual content and a drama that walked a fine line between the fiercely sexual and the coldly intellectual; like most of Vidor's best movies, it has improved with age. Alas, it was to be the director's last major triumph..." -- from http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&id=1800036162&cf=biog&intl=us

[atomicpossum]

Vidor's direction isn't the problem, it's Rand's absolute refusal to adapt her words to the screen, plus her insistance on Cooper as leading man. It's her 'Ed Wood' moment:

Long treasured as a masterpiece of camp ... One of the most unusual artifacts ever to emerge from Hollywood, Ayn Rand's adaptation of her novel is a contradictory hodgepodge of sub-Nietzschean musing, so laden with wooden rhetoric and hysterical ranting that it could never be mistaken for any speech ever uttered on this planet. The bizarre miscasting of Cooper as an arrogant Ubermann and Patricia Neal as a mildly sadomasochistic intellectual only add to the fun. In the legendary scene in which Dominique watches Roark pound his pneumatic drill into the quarry rockface, there's no mistaking the beatific look on her face for intellectual excitement.

http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1800067280&cf=info&intl=us