
Died at 106
male
John Dall (May 26, 1920 – January 15, 1971) was an American actor. Primarily a stage actor, he is best remembered today for two film roles; the cool-minded intellectual killer in Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope, and the trigger-happy lead in the 1950 noir Gun Crazy. He first came to fame as the young prodigy who comes alive under the tutelage of Bette Davis in The Corn Is Green, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Dall was born John Jenner Thompson in New York City, New York, the second son of Charles Jenner Thompson, a civil engineer, and his wife Henry (née Worthington). Dall died in Hollywood, California. Sources indicate he died of a heart attack. Description above from the Wikipedia article John Dall, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is the controversial epic about one man's unwavering individuality and the profound effect it has on both his friends and enemies. The novel was adapted in 1949 but fell short of its visionary source material. Constrained by a short runtime and 1940s social norms, many of the novel’s most compelling scenes and character arcs were drastically shortened or omitted entirely. While still a good film by conventional standards, it was nevertheless a disappointment to the author and many fans of the original novel. I believe The Fountainhead was adapted one decade too early. By the 1950s, Hollywood was beginning to challenge conventional filmmaking just as the novel’s protagonist challenged the norms of popular architecture. A decade where films could be pulpy yet deep, entertaining yet intellectually moving. In short, it was the perfect decade for a Fountainhead adaptation. This page envisions the film that could have been. Poster by DecoEchoes
