The 1949 movie of Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead" ends with Patricia Neal elevating to the top of a new skyscraper to greet its godlike architect, Gary Cooper. He is the archetypal Rand hero, an individualist who triumphs over the tradition-bound forces of mediocrity.

Oddly, Cooper's masterpiece of modernism resembles one those public housing projects that got blown up in the '70s. For today's audiences, it's quite an anticlimax. To think they took down perfectly good ten ...

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