[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

[FreeKeys]

I get the drift. But some of my circles of friends also get turned on by deliberately stilted intellectualisms, others by tongue-in-cheek subdued melodrama. There must have been enough of such non-regular people to make the admittedly unorthodox (and yes, "WEIRD") style a money-maker.

[BradyLS]

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:

When Hollywood "adapts words to the screen," that's when all the trouble starts.

Anyway, if you want to see a movie of an Ayn Rand novel that was extremely close to how it was written (and Ayn not even on the set) look for a copy of the Italian film Noi Vivi, the adaptation of he r novel We the Living.