Fahrenheit 451 (1966) Reviews

• An excellent adaptation of a great novel.

  panamajaq042004-05-14

  In a future where books have been outlawed, firemen are paid to burn books instead of put fires out. However, one fireman realizes that what he is doing is wrong and decides to go against the degenerate society he lives in. I have read reviews of this movie calling it "boring" and "outdated," and frankly I am amazed by how ignorant some people can be. Calling "Fahrenheit 451" outdated simply because the set designs look old and because there are no flashy computer effects shows that you have completely missed the point. The people who made this were not trying to give you a spectacle, they were trying to give you a message - a message that is even more important today than it was when this movie came out. "Fahrenheit 451" is a fine adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic novel about censorship. The movie changes many of the book's events, but the spirit of the book is preserved. The cinematography is truly great and the score is quite powerful. The acting is also great. Oskar Werner is right on the money as Montag the fireman. Julie Christie is wonderful playing dual roles as yin and yang: Montag's zombie-like wife, Linda, and Montag's friend, the young and energetic Clarisse. Cyril Cusack is also memorable as the evil Fire Captain Beatty - he isn't a cartoon villain, but a very realistic and human character. You may think that "Fahrenheit 451" delivers an irrelevant message. You may think that book burning is a thing of the past, a relic of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Look around you - book burning happens every day! How do you feel about people trying to ban "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" because the word "nigger" is used in it? How about whole sections of "Doctor Dolittle" being rewritten so that they are politically correct? Did you know that school textbooks may not make any mention of Mount Rushmore because it is offensive to a certain Indian tribe? Meanwhile, we are watching our giant-screen TVs and listening to our Walkmans (two inventions that were predicted by Bradbury). We are constantly "plugged in" and never take any time to just sit and think. Look around you - Ray Bradbury's story is coming true. I advise you to watch this movie, and to read the book. (Read the book first. You will appreciate the film more.) I hear that a remake is in the works. No doubt it will be filled with gaudy special effects and silly Hollywood cliches. I guess I should hold off judgment until I actually see it, but I doubt that it will contain any of the genius that can be found in this sadly underrated gem. It will be interesting to see what they do with the mechanical hound, though....

• Imagine a world without books....

  ClassicAndCampFilmReviews2005-05-12

  Fahrenheit 451" is a strange film, hard to describe. No one could have interpreted the classic Bradbury novel in the same bizarre, fascinating manner as Francois Truffaut. It's a book, and a film, about freedom, choices, individuality, and intellectual repression in a future where books are forbidden; where Firemen are men who start fires...fires in which they burn books. It was also the first color film directed by Truffaut. Although he by all accounts was not happy about making a color film and found it a bit unsettling, color is used to great effect here; sparingly, except for the extreme shade of red that is seen throughout. "Fahrenheit 451" is supposed to be the temperature at which book paper catches fire, as the protagonist Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) explains in a scene at the beginning. Guy is a Fireman who seems happy enough with his life until he is approached by a young woman named Clarisse (Julie Christie) on his way home from work one day. She starts up a conversation with him, and the two become friendly. She bewilders him but challenges him to think and feel....and read. And when he arrives home we see his wife (also played by Julie Christie, with long hair), sedated and watching the wallscreen (TV of sorts)...we see what his life is really like, although he had told Clarisse he was "happy"...he is not. As his friendship with Clarisse grows, he starts to secretly take home, hoard, and read some of the books he finds in the course of his daily work, and as he reads, he becomes obsessed with the books. They become his mistress, and are what finally make him feel affection and warmth. And when he starts to feel and care, so do we. The two single best scenes are a passionate one involving an old woman who refuses to leave her books, her "children" as she calls them; and the wonderful ending of the film. The countless, painful closeups of books as they are being burned are beautifully done, and difficult to watch. Truffaut was a well-known disciple of Alfred Hitchcock's films, so when Hitchcock fired his long-time music collaborator Bernard Herrmann during the filming of "Torn Curtain", Truffaut was thrilled to acquire his talents for his own film. The score for "F451" is beautiful, and the film would not be nearly as effective without it. Writer/producer/director Frank Darabont ("The Green Mile", "The Shawshank Redemption") is working on a new film of "Fahrenheit 451" this year. He says it won't be a remake of the original film.

• Aren't We Already Here?

  rmax3048232010-08-27

  Sometimes I get the feeling that, given a few more years, maybe not too many, the only difference between us and the fantasy future in this film is that the firemen of the future will loathe books, criminalize and burn them, while we just ignore them. This bleak picture of the future is Ray Bradbury's, filmed by Francois Truffaut, scored by Bernard Hermann, and starring Oskar Werner, Julie Christie, and Cyril Cusack, with Anton Diffring in a supporting role. The tract houses on wooded lots all look alike. Their inhabitants, including Werner's airhead wife, Christie, spend their time chatting cheerfully about how good things are, when not absorbed by Cousin Pollyanna on the telly. There are no books, of course. Books only make people think and thinking makes people sad. It might even prompt some to dissent. Dangerous things, books. So it's illegal to own them. There is a kind of mailbox in front of the fire station where anyone can drop a note accusing his obnoxious neighbor of owning books. This activates the fire brigade, led by Cusack and crewed by the ambitious young Werner and the jealous Diffring. The firemen board their flamboyantly red engine and sip to the location of the accused, where they tear everything apart in their search for books. If the books are found, they are piled together and set alight with some kind of flame thrower. Out of curiosity, Werner slips one of the contraband books into his tunic and takes it home. Late at night, when Christie is asleep and no one is around, he creeps into the kitchen, turns on the light, and begins reading Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield." He haltingly reads everything on the title page, including the name of the publishers in London and New York. Then he gets to the text. "Chapter One. I am born." Well, I'll tell you -- the guy is hooked. Before you know it he's got a secret library and he's reading everything he can secret away during his raids. His wife finds out, squeals on him, and leaves. Werner's last raid is on his own house but in addition to burning the pile of books on the floor he burns everything, including his boss. On the advice of a criminal neighbor, also played by Julie Christie, he makes his escape to a group of "living books" who have carved a living out of the wilderness. They don't OWN books, so they can't be prosecuted. They ARE books. Their names correspond to the titles of the book that each has memorized. Werner is warmly accepted by the community. He would like to be "David Copperfield" but "we already have a David Copperfield," so he becomes the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The final scenes show us people wandering about through the snowy woods, ignoring each other, mumbling aloud the words of the texts they've memorized. Presumably they live happily ever after. The picture rolls along effectively and spookily. The photography is fine and the acting is at a professional level, though I do wish Oskar Werner with his rosebud mouth didn't run as if he were dancing over red hot coals, gracelessly, his elbows raised like an ostrich's. The main problem I had with the movie is that it might have made a good short story but it's a little thin for a feature-length movie. What I mean is that we can already see that the popularity of books -- of carefully crafted reading material in general -- is in decline. Newspapers and weekly news magazines are in Cheyne-Stokes respiration. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are both losing readers, while the picture newspapers still glare at us from the supermarket checkout counters. (Latest headline in The Globe, as I write this, "Obama IS a Mulsim.") Another generation and they'll be historical curiosities, although we may still be able to buy broadsheets full of photos of celebrities now grown old and fat. Books are in just as bad a shape. I know this to be a fact because nobody bought my books! Hardly made a dime. And they were just full of penetrating insights, too! (Sob.) Okay. We can accept the decline of literacy as a fait accompli, although we also have to note that among the many books we see curling up in pain in the middle of the bonfires, we don't see any works on science, technology, or math. Everything burnt is a novel or a work of philosophy -- the humanities but not the sciences. Well, that's understandable. When was the last time a quadratic equation generated sad thoughts in anyone? But this problem is never brought up in the movie. As far as the story is concerned, books are books. Another hole in the logic is this: Before books can be loathed, they must become important in social life. No one loathes the moon or a polymerized molecule of nitrogen dioxide because who the hell cares about them? Nobody. They're irrelevant. And that's where books seem to be headed today. Not towards criminalization but towards total irrelevance. U* cnt H8 something U dnt no abt bc Ur 2 dumb. When I was in high school we read "The Great Gatsby" in English class. Out of the hundreds of college students I've taught, there were only two who'd read "Gatsby" -- one on her own and another in an ADVANCED PLACEMENT class. Bradbury and Truffaut are on the right track, I think. Books will disappear. But not because they're illegal, but just because nobody wants them anymore. That future is almost bleaker because it leaves us without any enemy except ourselves.

• visionary brilliance

  Jonny_Numb2005-01-06

  Go figure that I had the privilege of seeing "Fahrenheit 451," for free, on a big screen a few years back (an independent Illinois art house had gotten hold of what was allegedly one of the last surviving prints), and at the time hadn't the foggiest concept of how PRIVILEGED an event it was. Sitting in a theater crowded with college students on a budget with nothing better to do, I watched this diverting little retro item, appreciated its subtlety, nuance, bold visual style, and 'got' the message that if we're not careful, we'll be mindless drones having our desires dictated by The Tube (in current times, that's hardly a profound statement). Francois Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel is a bold visual feast that presents a time that might seem 'retrograde' in the eye of a modern pop-culture snob, but ultimately projects what a conceivable 'future' might look like (and not that CGI malarkey served up in "The Matrix"). Interiors of houses are awash in odd colors and give shelter to appliances that don't look dissimilar from our own; TV screens embedded in living-room walls play programs which vacuous housewives interact with sometimes. The film is so relentlessly confident in its appearance that it withstands the test of time. Though if "Fahrenheit 451" only had its storybook style to rely on, it would fade and be filed away as a mere technical achievement. Truffaut, working from strong source material, concocts a riveting parable about ignorance and the things we, as humans, take for granted. The story follows Guy Montag, an Everyman who is employed as a fireman--a connotation which entails ransacking residences in search of books (reading and writing have been outlawed in this world) and burning them. He has a medicated-smile wife (Julie Christie), a quiet home life, and is in line for a promotion, until a neighbor (Christie again) inspires him to question his motives for working such a sordid job. One character argues that books cause depression, making people confront unpleasant feelings. "Fahrenheit 451" sometimes runs the risk of lending truth to that statement--in some ways, it is a bleak commentary on civilization, but at the same time grounded in a benevolent humanity that offsets Orwell's brutal, pessimistic world of "1984" (though both texts and films share similar themes). This humanity is underlined in an upbeat, even comic ending (the details of which I won't divulge here). "Fahrenheit 451" is a spellbinding work of art, in good company with other incendiary works ("A Clockwork Orange" and "Fight Club" come to mind) that have defied the constraints of time and age.

• Engrossing, underrated sci-fi

  moonspinner552005-04-09

  From Ray Bradbury's novel about totalitarian society that has banned books and printed words in order to eliminate independent thought; Oskar Werner plays professional book-burner who becomes enraptured with stories. Possibly a bit too thin at this length, but a fascinating peek at a cold future (which the times have just about caught up to). Didn't get a warm reception from critics in its day, yet the performances by Werner and Julie Christie (in a dual role as both Werner's wife and a rebel acquaintance) are top notch. I was never a fan of director François Truffaut's too-precious stories of childhood, but this film, curiously his only English-language picture, is extremely well-directed; the sequence with the woman and her books afire is one amazing set-piece, with tight editing, incredible and precise art direction, and the camera in all the right places. Truffaut lets you feel the agony of book paper curling up black in a mass of orange flames, and the proud defiance of the woman as she herself strikes the match. Unforgettable. *** from ****