FAHRENHEIT (451) Movie Review

It's easy to see what's wrong with François Truffaut's risky and foolhardy adaptation of Ray Bradbury's seminal science-fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. The English-language dialogue is stilted and awkward; Oskar Werner appears to be struggling to stay awake; the special effects and process photography are ludicrously bad. Yet if so much of Fahrenheit 451 is all wrong, why is it so moving? The answer, I think, has to do not with the awkwardness of many of the film's individual pieces, but with the passion and sincerity that surges quite powerfully through its entire conception. Fahrenheit 451 is a cautionary tale about a future society in which the printed word—and therefore the controversies and conflicting ideas that books bring—is banned. With all new houses fireproof, the job of firemen in Bradbury's future will be to start fires—to burn books whenever a neighbor or a jealous lover decides to turn someone possessing a private library over to the guardians of the police state. Truffaut's affection for books comes through far more strongly than does the new-found passion of his lawbreaking protagonist, Montag the fireman (Werner), and it's the director's obvious love for his subject—expressed in eloquent sequences like the snow-covered camp of “book people” at the film's end—that gives the picture a startling emotional immediacy in spite of all its conventional “flaws.” Composer Bernard Herrmann's heartbreaking score doesn't hurt either, and Truffaut knew it. In a journal the director kept for Cahiers du Cinema on the making of the film, he stated “if one is bored by the film at least it will be boredom set to music, and when it's Bernard Herrmann's music no one will be tired by two or three minute sections like those in Vertigo or Psycho.” But the director needn't have worried. Truffaut's spirit lives in this film, just like the authors whose words are remembered by the book people in its transcendent ending. With Julie Christie and Cyril Cusack. Cinematography by Nicolas Roeg.

NEXT STOP … Mississippi Mermaid, Two English Girls, Testament

1966 112m/C FR Oskar Werner, Julie Christie, Cyril Cusack, Anton Diffring; D: Francois Truffaut; W: Ray Bradbury, Jean-Louis Richard, Francois Truffaut; C: Nicolas Roeg; M: Bernard Herrmann.VHS, LV USH, MLB