The Fountainhead (Vidor, 1940) & The Stunt Man (Rush, 1980):
Roxy Bar and Screen, London Bridge, 7pm
This is screening as part of the Scala Beyond, a six-week season
celebrating all forms of cinema exhibition across the UK, from film
clubs to film festivals, picture palaces to pop-up venues. You can find
more details here at the website.
Here is the Roxy introduction: Filmbar70 celebrates Hollywood’s overreaching, overblown and
often misguided attempts to produce something ‘meaningful’. Cast in the
shade of their artistic European cousins, those moguls of the 'dream
factory' not content to produce mere ‘entertainment’ drove headlong into
‘prestige’ projects with reckless abandon, often creating something
bizarre and endearing in the process. Vanity projects, socio/political
tracts and unclassifiable artifacts all litter the cinematic history of
this grand tradition, one that continues to this very day.
The Fountainhead (1949)
King Vidor's hilariously overwrought adaptation of Ayn Rand's
unfilmable novel is a nigh on hysterical melodrama about architecture
and the integrity of artistic vision without boundaries. When Gary
Cooper isn't drilling away at rock faces he dreams of modernist
architecture, as Patricia Neal's misanthropic journo gets hot and
bothered by it all.
Here is the trailer
&
The Stunt Man (1980)
Director Richard Rush's parody of the 'auteur' in Hollywood, this
long gestating prestige project was probably the last gasp of
Hollywood's ‘70s 'golden era', and a bizarre oddity even for
‘Follywood’. Peter O'Toole hams it up with relish as a film director
playing God to social outcast Steve Railsback.
Here is the trailer
Chicago Reader review of The Fountainhead:
'King Vidor turned Ayn Rand's preposterous “philosophical” novel into one
of his finest and most personal films (1949), mainly by pushing the
phallic imagery so hard that it surpasses Rand's rightist diatribes and
even camp (“I wish I'd never seen your skyscraper!”), entering some
uncharted dimension where melodrama and metaphysics exist side by side.
The images have a dynamism, a spatial tension, that comes partly from
Frank Lloyd Wright (whose life Rand appropriated for her novel) and
partly from Eisenstein, yet the pattern of their deployment is Vidor's
own: the emotions rise and fall in broad, operatic movements that are
unmistakably sexual and irresistibly involving.'Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review of The Stunt Man:
'Pretentious, overenergized, muddled, intellectually bogus,
and very entertaining for it. Richard Rush's film concerns a cryptic
fugitive (Steve Railsback) who finds refuge, of a sort, with a movie
company led by a flamboyant, engagingly sadistic director (Peter
O'Toole). Experienced as pure motion, the picture is a rush,
barreling through highly charged action montages and baroque flights of
rack focus, though dramatically it becomes disappointingly conventional
in the last few reels. The theme is illusion and reality, but you're
better off if you try to forget it.'
Dave Kehr
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