Vidor pulled out all the stops for his stylized adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, the doggedly epic apotheosis of her theories of socially beneficial selfishness. Written to refute the New Deal, her novel about a misappreciated genius architect has found a new Reagan-era audience. Gary Cooper was the odd choice to incarnate the hero-modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright-who is mocked by the envious minds around him, notably a power-hungry publisher (Raymond Massey) and his newpaper's architecture critic, who masks socialistic conformity as an intellectual aesthetic. The genius finds a worthy mate in Patricia Neal, in a performance of steely masochism that reaches its height in the slap-down, mutual-rape scenes. If the script reads like a comic strip, Vidor had only himself to blame. When he asked Rand to draft one herself, she agreed to do it for free, stipulating only-in a move her hero would have admired-that no words be changed without her consent. (When she discovered Vidor shooting a scene he'd secretly rewritten, she got Jack Warner to rein him in.) What propels the film is Vidor's rapid staging and Robert Burks' noir cinematography (perfectly captured in this new print from the Library of Congress). Visually at least, it's easy to glimpse expressionist echoes of the director of The Crowd. For all The Fountainhead's thoroughly deranged sexual politics, it refreshingly avoids Hollywood timidity. It's an oddball movie, no doubt, but with the strength of its convictions: the triumph of "the supreme egoist." Scott Simmon