Fahrenheit 451 is a 1966 science fiction drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Oskar Werner, Julie Christie, and Cyril Cusack. Based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, the film is about an oppressive future in which a fireman, whose duty it is to destroy all books, begins to question his task.^[1] This was Truffaut's first colour film^[2] as well as his only English-language film. At the 1966 Venice Film Festival, Fahrenheit 451 was nominated for the Golden Lion.^[3]

Plot[link]

In the future, a totalitarian government employs a force known as Firemen to seek out and destroy all literature, permitting them to search anyone, anywhere, at any time. One of the Firemen, Guy Montag (Oskar Werner), meets one of his neighbours, Clarisse (Julie Christie), a 20-year-old schoolteacher whose job is hanging by a thread due to her unorthodox views. The two have a discussion about his job, where she asks if he ever reads the books he burns. Curious, he begins to hide books in his house, and begins reading them, starting with Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. This leads to conflict with his wife, Linda, who is more concerned with being popular enough to be a member of The Family, an interactive television program that refers to its viewers as "cousins".

At the house of a book collector, the captain (Cyril Cusack) talks with Montag at length about how books change people and make them want to be better than others, which is considered anti-social. The book collector, a middle-aged woman (who was seen with Clarisse a few times during Montag's rides to and from work), refuses to leave her house, and sets fire to her apartment and is burned to death with her books. Returning home that day, Montag shocks his wife's friends with a reading from a novel. One of their guests cries because she now realizes how shallow her life is and remembers the feelings that she repressed over the years. Montag dreams of Clarisse as the book collector who killed herself. That same night, Clarisse's house is raided, but she escapes through a trapdoor in the roof thanks to her uncle. Montag breaks into the captain's office looking for information about the missing Clarisse, and is caught, but not punished.

Montag meets with Clarisse and helps her break back into her house to destroy papers that would bring the Firemen to others like her. She tells him of the "book people", a hidden sect of people who flout the law, each of whom have memorized a single book to keep it alive. Later, Montag tells the captain he is resigning, but is convinced to go on one more call, which turns out to be Montag's own house. His wife has left him and, unable to live with Montag's obsession with books, turned him in. Angrily, he destroys the bedroom and television before setting fire to the books. The captain lectures him about the books, and pulls a last book from Montag's coat, for which Montag kills him. He escapes and finds the book people, where he views his "capture" on television, staged to keep the masses entertained and because the government doesn't want him alive. Montag selects a book to memorize—Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe—and becomes one of them.

Cast[link]

• Oskar Werner as Montag
• Julie Christie as Linda Montag/Clarisse
• Cyril Cusack as Captain
• Anton Diffring as Fabian
• Jeremy Spenser as Man with the Apple
• Bee Duffell as Book Woman
• Alex Scott as Book Person^[4]

Production[link]

Truffaut kept a detailed diary during the production, and this was later published in both French and English (in Cahiers du Cinema in English). In this diary, he called Fahrenheit 451 his "saddest and most difficult" filmmaking experience, mainly because of intense conflicts between Truffaut and Werner.^[5][6]

The film was Universal Pictures' first European production. Julie Christie was originally just cast as Linda Montag, not both Linda and Clarisse. The part of Clarisse was offered to both Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda. After much thought, Truffaut decided that the characters should not have a villain/hero relationship, but rather be two sides of the same coin, and cast Christie in both roles, although the idea came from the producer, Lewis M. Allen.^[7]

In an interview from 1998, Charles Aznavour said he was Truffaut's first choice to play the role eventually given to Werner; Aznavour said Jean-Paul Belmondo was the director's second choice, but the film's producers refused on the grounds that both of them were not familiar enough for the English speaking audience.^[8] Paul Newman, Peter O'Toole and Montgomery Clift were also considered for the role of Montag; Terence Stamp was cast, but dropped out when he feared being overshadowed by Christie's dual roles in the film.^[9]

Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, and Sterling Hayden were considered for the role of the captain before Cyril Cusack was cast.^{[citation needed]}

The film was shot at Pinewood Studios in England, with the monorail exterior scene taken at the French SAFEGE test track, in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire near Orléans, France (since dismantled). The film featured the Alton housing estate in Roehampton, South London and also Edgcumbe Park in Crowthorne, Berkshire. The final scene of the Book People was filmed in a rare and unexpected snowstorm that occurred on Julie Christie's birthday, April 14 1966.^[10]

The production work was done in French, as Truffaut spoke virtually no English, but co-wrote the screenplay with Jean-Louis Ricard. Truffaut expressed disappointment with the often stilted and unnatural English-language dialogue. He was much happier with the version that was dubbed into French.

The movie's opening credits are spoken rather than displayed in type, which might be the director's hint of what life would be like in an illiterate culture. Tony Walton did costumes and production design, while Syd Cain did art direction. Clarisse survives to the end of the film by escaping a raid on her home and is reunited with Montag when he flees the city. Bradbury was pleased with Truffaut's decision.^[11]

Reception[link]

Critics at the time felt mixed about the film, but in later years the film would be liked for what it was, a story of one possible future. Time magazine called the film a "weirdly gay little picture that assails with both horror and humor all forms of tyranny over the mind of man"; it "strongly supports the widely held suspicion that [Christie] cannot actually act. Though she plays two women of diametrically divergent dispositions, they seem in her portrayal to differ only in their hairdos." They also noted that the film's "somewhat remote theme challenged [Truffaut's] technical competence more than his heart; the finished film displays the artisan more than the artist."^[2]

Bosley Crowther called the film a "pretentious and pedantic production" based on "an idea that called for slashing satire of a sort beyond [Truffaut's] grasp, and with language he couldn't fashion into lively and witty dialogue. The consequence is a dull picture—dully fashioned and dully played—which is rendered all the more sullen by the dazzling color in which it is photographed."^[12]

The film was nominated for a 1967 Hugo Award in the "Best Dramatic Presentation" category, along with Fantastic Voyage and 3 episodes of Star Trek. It lost out to the Star Trek episode "The Menagerie".^[13]

Martin Scorsese has called the film an "underrated picture" which had influenced his own films.^[14]

Leslie Halliwell described it as "1984 stuff, a little lacking on plot and rather tentatively directed, but with charming moments".^[15]

On the review aggregator web site Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an 83% positive rating among top film critics based on 30 reviews, and a 70% positive audience rating based on 23,863 user ratings.^[16]

Author Ray Bradbury has said in later interviews that, despite its flaws, he was pleased with the film. He was particularly fond of the film's climax, where the Book People walk through a snowy countryside reciting the poetry and prose they've memorized, set to Herrmann's melodious score. He found it especially poignant and moving.^{[citation needed]}

Music[link]

According to an introduction by Ray Bradbury to a CD of a rerecording of the film score by William Stromberg conducting the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, Bradbury had suggested Bernard Herrmann to Truffaut. Bradbury had visited the set of Torn Curtain, meeting both Alfred Hitchcock and Herrmann before Herrmann left the film. When Truffaut contacted Bradbury for a conference about his book, Bradbury recommended Herrmann, as Bradbury knew Truffaut had written a detailed book about Hitchcock.^[17] When Herrmann asked Truffaut why he was chosen over "modern" composers such as the director's friends Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen, the director replied that "They'll give me music of the twentieth century, but you'll give me music of the twenty first!"^[18] Herrmann used a score of only string instruments, harp, xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, and glockenspiel. As with Torn Curtain, Herrmann refused the studio's request to do a title song.

References[link]

Citations

Bibliography

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Fahrenheit 451 (1966 film)

• Fahrenheit 451 at the Internet Movie Database
• Fahrenheit 451 (1966 film) at the TCM Movie Database
• Fahrenheit 451 at AllRovi
• Fahrenheit 451 at Rotten Tomatoes

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