Customer Reviews

Fahrenheit 451

5 star:		(58)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Truffaut's film and the novel from which it is adapted have both been misunderstood for too long. To start with, you have to understand that Bradbury's novels, plays, and story are almost always allegorical - so you have to look for meanings on more than one level. Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451 captures all of the allegorical levels of the novel. To explain: One of the many reasons human beings read and write books is because we have a deep need to know if our inner experiences are shared by others - this need can only be answered within the context of an intimate relationship, either with another human being or with a book, which allows us to reveal or to be revealed as we are. The more the State controls the use of language, the more we are controlled. In Bradbury's novel the State effectively limits intimacy by forbidding books; and since the only reference to reality is dictated by the State, what can Montag or his wife know of love? How intimate can their relationship be? Fahrenheit 451 is a story about a man who has conformed completely to external reality; or has he? Can anyone really sell their soul to the State? Truffaut's film beautifully articulates the story, atmosphere, and themes of Bradbury's novel, as Montag unconsciously - as if sleepwalking - begins to stack the kindling, dry wood, and fuel of his dehumanized existence for the moment when his creative energy can no longer be contained and his life bursts into flames. Notice, also, how Bernard Herrman's score evokes these images of somnambulism, fire building, and spontaneous combustion. The rest, of course, is a story of rebirth, of the phoenix rising from the ashes - the victory of creative passion over State control. To summarize, 451 synergizes the story of a man's mid-life crisis with the crisis of repression of human values represented by McCarthyism. Note well: you have to give yourself over to this film in order to really appreciate it - the film requires a meditative state of mind and empathic response. Montag finds that he can no longer simply function as a cog in a machine - he needs to be loved for himself. Clearly, the literal or analytically minded will not "get" this film; neither will the romantically inclined. It's a film about wholeness, about not allowing yourself to be fragmented, or having parts of yourself chopped off by external forces. You have to bring your total self to it. It's a film about actually living through your worst life crisises, learning from them, and determining your own way of life, instead of doping and drugging yourself with memory killers devised by the State. In short, watch the film and form your own opinion - you dont need the concensus or false reassurance of a film critic or other idiot in order to live your own life.

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper will burn. It is the basis for the premise of this film, which is based upon the Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi novel of the same name. The film takes the viewer to a stark future in which firemen start fires rather than put them out. Their main mission appears to be to root out books, wherever they may be found, and burn them. Those who harbor books in their home are breaking the law and are subject to arrest by the state. The written word is simply forbidden.

Oskar Werner plays the role of Guy Montag, a fireman who is married to a beautiful air-head named Linda, who spends her days popping pills, while glued to a wall screen TV. Played with appropriate bubble-brained inertia by the talented Julie Christie, this is just one of the dual roles she plays in this film. The other role is that of Clarisse, a would be school teacher and seeming misfit in that society, as she actually likes to talk about ideas, the very reason that books are forbidden. It seems that books are looked upon as giving people ideas, which is viewed by the state as a mechanism for making people unhappy with their lot.

When Clarisse singles out Montag for conversation, he is intrigued by the fact that she is capable of independent thought. It is not long before he, too, like those whose books he has burned, is also, to his wife's dismay, hoarding books. She feels that Montag is simply sucking the fun out of her life. Clarisse and Montag form an alliance of sorts, as his world comes tumbling down. Betrayed by his conformist wife Linda, Montag joins the ranks of fugitive book lovers, hunted by the very firemen with whom he served. These fugitives are not known by their names, but rather, by the title of the book to which they have committed to memory, in hopes that one day the world will once again be ready to accept that which they have committed to memory.

The film has a stark, futuristic quality about it. Symbolism is rampant throughout the film. The homes of those who hoard books are often homes that are cozy and reminiscent of homes of our book loving society today, while those of people who are with the program are stark and cold. The all black uniforms worn by the firemen are reminiscent of those worn by the storm troopers of Nazi Germany. The actions of the firemen, as they search for those who would hoard books, as well as the search for the books themselves, are also reminiscent of the search by the Nazis for those who would harbor those who were deemed undesirable under the Nazi regime, as well as the search for undesirables themselves. Oskar Werner's German accents underscores this imagery.

This is Francois Truffaut's first and only foray into the direction of an English language film. He himself was co-writer of the screenplay, which is perhaps why the imagery seems to supercedes the dialogue. There are many stylistic flourishes throughout the film. Ray Bradbury's, "The Martian Chronicles", is one of the books seen to be burning. It is also one of the books that a fugitive has committed to memory. Newspapers in the film consist of pictures only. Even the opening credits of the film are in keeping with the premise of the film that the written word is forbidden. As such, the opening credits are spoken. Moreover, Bernard Herrmann's edgy score certainly adds to the bleak, futuristic feel of the film. This is a film that those who enjoyed the novel upon which the film is based should see.

I first saw this film when it was released a few decades ago and loved it. I just watched it again last night and still loved it. As a HUGE book lover, I was absolutely mesmerized by this tale of a society that not only has censored all books, but also has firemen who hunt down culprits who harbor books and then burn them at 451 degrees, the heat needed to burn paper. It is French director Truffaut's only English language film, which does not hurt it in the least. This is an incredibly dull society of people who don't do much other than sit in front of tv-like screens watching approved programing put on by the state. Some of them also go to work on public transit although they do nothing that requires reading. There are no road signs, no newspapers, no menus, not a shred of visible written matter anywhere in this society. Children in schoolrooms do solely mass oral memorization. For written matter gives people ideas and this society decides it is better to live without ideas. Why one wants to live without ideas remains an unasked question in this culture. Oskar Werner plays the fireman who gets more and more intrigued by these books he's burning. Julie Christie plays two roles: a rebel who sides with the book harborers and Werner's wife, who is a couch potato living in front of the tv-screen most of the day. I was amazed to see that Werner's clothes and hair looked right up to the minute despite this film's being several decades old. You would think he was a young actor in 2001. The resolution of this film is absolutely wonderful and thus I won't say a word about it so as to spoil it for you.

There are many who haven't cared for this movie since it first came out in the mid-Sixties, and they're right to say that it's not very much like the Bradbury novel it's based on, the special effects are largely terrible (the wires helping to levitate the police jetpacks are comically evident), and Oskar Werner seems surprisingly stiff in the lead role of Montag (as Truffaut himself admitted, Werner lost all the spontaeity he showed in JULES ET JIM and seems to be working at his acting very painfully).

All that being said, this film is nevertheless a minor classic. It is one of the most thoughtful and atmospheric science fiction films ever made, and has an absolutely thrilling Bernard Herrmann score to compliment the gorgeous Nicholas Roeg photography. The closeups of the books burning are in particular quite stunning and oddly poignant--one book burns only one page at a time, as each subsequent sheet of paper curls up and vanishes--so that they seem like little murders. The film also features one of Julie Christie's greatest performances as the emotionally anesthetized and intellectually infantile housewife Linda (oddly, she was originally only cast in the more typical role for her of the rebel Clarice, but when Truffaut was left at the last minute without a Linda he asked her to double roles--much to the film's enrichment).

The closing sequence of the book reciting their novels in the light snow is justly famous, but there are few truffaut films with so many "classic sequences": the old woman burning herself down atop her pile of confiscated books as a political protest; Linda's near-fatal (and immediately forgotten) drug overdose, and her subsequent recovery; the idiotic audience-participation show she and Montag watch on the wallscreen; and the great montage sequence showing the people on Montag's monorail tram fondling themselves and kissing their reflections, underscoring both the loneliness and narcissism of this society.

A special note to first-time (or multiple) viewers: pay close attention to the words the "Cousin" announcer says on Linda's wallscreen.. they're actually incredibly funny...

Fahrenheit 451 is based on Ray Bradbury's novel with the same name, which sends a chilling message to the audience. Most civilizations have fallen and have often been followed by a dark age. This story takes place sometime in the future when one civilization is in the middle of its dark age and where the written word is banned in all forms. These laws are being carried out by the fire department that has a reversed role in society compared to our present time fire departments. Its main function is to find and burn books at all costs. Meanwhile, people are being kept happy through pills and interactive TV among other things. On one occasion, a neighbor asks the main character, Montag (Oscar Werner), if he has ever read any of the books before he burned them. This question plants a seed of curiosity within Montag and he is about to break the law through reading. This then leads to the rebirth of Montag. Fahrenheit 451 is a superb story that offers many excerpts from written pieces delicately handled in the film, which enhances the atmosphere of the story. Moreover, there are several lessons to be learned from the film. These lessons come from dialogue, cinematography, directing, and the mise-en-scene, which leaves the audience with a terrific science fiction experience.

No one ever said that Hollywood was morally required to maintain the vision, the ethos, the scope of the book from which the movie was made. The jump from paper to screen is too vast to permit more than a taste of the original. With Fahrenheit 451, Francois Truffaut capably manages to maintain the balancing act of the increasing inner turmoil of the book burning fireman Guy Montag with a selected few of the mind-rending themes from the novel by Ray Bradbury.
In his novel, Bradbury had the time and luxury to explore in detail the many themes of his richly textured work, most notably the interacting triangle of technology, education, and human ennui. In the movie version, Truffaut hints at how human society has perverted this triangle to arrive at the social structure that Bradbury thought not too far from his own.
Oskar Werner plays a deeply troubled Guy Montag whose surface joy at being a fireman is quickly put to the test by a light-headed female neighbor (Clarisse, a double role by Julie Christie, who also plays his wife Linda). One of the minor themes of the book is also present in the film: that the love of books is contagious. Both book and film play up this disease metaphor with fire as the cauterizing agent. Clarisse 'infects' Guy early on with an innocuous question--'Are you happy?' Guy, of course, thinks that he is, but he soon resorts to stealing the books that he is supposed to burn. The turning point for Guy and the audience is the scene where an old woman chooses to die with her books than to live without them. Just before she self-immolates, she cries out to the firemen (interestingly enough, she looks at Guy as if she senses that he is ripe for infection), "Books are alive; they speak to me!" Later, when Guy is trying to convince Linda, whose brain is surely turned to mush-paste by the enemy of free thought, interactive television, he uses much the same phrasing. Still later, Guy attempts to reach Linda's female friends by reading to them from a forbidden book. The result in both cases is the same. Both Linda and her friends are 'immune' to the infection.
Cyril Cusack, as fire Chief Beatty, has a much reduced role. In the novel, he provides much needed background so that the mad world of his society has some philosophical underpinning. Truffaut uses Beatty mostly as a flat character who stands in opposition to Montag's re-humanification. Still, Cusack manages to invest his character with the subtext as one who is driven to suicide to counter the deadening insensitivity of the world that he partly helped to create. Why else would he give a known traitor a flamethrower after telling Guy that he was under arrest?
The end of the film shows a society in which all surviving book lovers combine to prepare for the day when they will emerge from the shadows of a nuclear war to infect others with the notion that it is not books that are bad, but rather it is the use to which words are put that makes them so. The closing scene of a kindly, dying old man teaching his forbidden knowledge to his youthful successor teaches us too that books are no more than a metaphor for the mind. To destroy the one is to destroy the other.

This film first appeared in theaters in 1966. The Vietnam War was just getting under way, and the Pentagon was beefing up its disinformation campaign that was later documented in David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest. The film was based on a novel by Ray Bradbury, first published in 1953, when the hysterical Red Scares of McCarthyism were near their peak.

Bradbury's writing was originally published in the second issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine. In an interview on the DVD, Bradbury claims that Fahrenheit 451 was his only work of science fiction.

That the "New Wave" director, Francois Truffaut agreed to direct the film was unusual. Bradbury was already an established writer, who probably wanted some artistic control and Truffaut was promoting the auteur theory of film in which the director has absolute artistic control.

The friction had a couple of effects on the film. Truffaut, eager to begin filming wrote the screenplay before fully mastering English. Even Truffaut was disappointed in the end with the stiff, flat dialog. For Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451 was his first, and last, English-language film. This may have contributed to the flatness of the characters. Some reviewers made an asset out of the stiffness by saying that the characters, deprived of serious thinking, and of books, and addled by drugs, were themselves, in fact, flat, soulless creatures. Bradbury had little say on the final screenplay.

The central character, Guy Montag, (Oskar Werner) is a "fireman." In this disturbing vision of the future, firemen burn books. Books are all but banned by the government because they have "conflicting ideas" in them. Those ideas can make people feel bad. It is the government's job to keep people happy, with drugs, large-screen television, and other entertainment. Does anyone still remember the term "Happy Talk News? Let's keep it positive.

The novel played on the concerns of the time when it was written. Censorship and suppression of thought, mainly through intimidation, was being exercised in the United States. The intimidation was being done by radio and newspaper columnists, who supported McCarthy. The book burnings by Nazis, which started in Germany in 1933 and continued until the end of World War II, were still in living memory. And the world was still reeling from the horrible pictures of the explosions of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as implications of the mass production of nuclear weapons.

By the time the film appeared, America was more concerned with race riots. So, burning was a viscerally powerful theme. Lost on most viewers in 1966 was the detail that among the burned books was the film journal Cahiers du Cinema for which Truffaut wrote, and that on the magazine's cover was a picture from the film Breathless, written by Truffaut. Also among the burned books: The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, both written by Bradbury.

Truffaut, however, contributed much to the uniqueness of the film as a work of art separate from the book. From the opening credits, which were spoken and not displayed on the screen, to the ending, in which the exiles who have devoted their lives to memorizing books recite their books while walking blissfully in the snow, Truffaut's genius is there. Also a stroke of genius was the casting of Julie Christie as Monag's drug-addled wife, and as the more compassionate and interested Clarisse, who seduces him into reading and thinking.

Like Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, describes a hedonist world, where the people need not think. I'll have my Valium now. And I have cable, so there must be something to watch. Maybe a rerun of Jerry Springer.

It's curious that a director who spent so much of his early career railing against the tyranny of the literary tradition in French cinema should spend so much of his career either adapting novels or filling his films with techniques from and references to literature at every turn, so his attraction to Ray Bradbury's fable isn't that surprising. What is surprising is that in many ways it's his most purely cinematic film, discarding his usual over-reliance on voice-over to carry underwritten scenes for more purely cinematic forms of interpretation. Even the readings from the forbidden books are kept to a minimum: the obsession is in Montag's behavior, not the words he speaks.

Truffaut's playfulness is all over the material, from casting an actor who forbade his children to watch TV or go to the cinema as the fire chief (Cyril Cusack in the film's standout performance) to dramatically masking off half the screen and heightening the dramatic music for what turns out to be a less than dramatic moment in a search - and that's without the inclusion of Cahiers du Cinema among the burning books or mentioning Anton Diffring's brief moment in drag. But then this is an absurdist world, where firemen slide up poles and start fires and where fascism is accepted in that way it always is when gradually introduced because of people's innate ability to adapt to their circumstances, no matter how absurd or restricting.

It improves on Bradbury's novel by losing some of the more distancing sci-fi devices such as the fortune telling dog, and setting it's future in a soulless post-war New Town environment that is close enough to the real look of the time to add to the credibility. Much of what there is in the film isn't that far from reality, with plasma wall screens offering inept interactive' TV (even down to pressing the red button) becoming status symbols, and betrayal increasingly encouraged as an everyday, socially acceptable act. Indeed, the world it presents, where people touch themselves, not each other, and where conflicting ideas are discouraged because they just make people unhappy, seems all too contemporary. Only what is possibly the single worst special effect in film history (those laughable flying policeman on all-too visible wires), the film's one ill-judged excursion into optical effects, sticks out like a sore thumb.

Despite the huge problems between Oskar Werner (who wanted to play Montag with a wink and a smile) and Truffaut (who ended the shoot directing through an intermediary, using body doubles and having to cut Werner's takes shortly before he smiled!), Montag seems a credible protagonist, an empty vessel who suddenly has his horizons violently opened. Even the accent seems strangely right: not so much the idea of a German playing a fascist book burner (indeed, Diffring's German accent is dubbed here), but the way it seems to compliment the formal language of the piece. Even Julie Christie's blandness and sporadic awkward enthusiasm work well enough in this environment for her almost to seem to give a perform for once.

Throw in Bernard Herrmann's remarkably beautiful, sparingly used score, never more effective than in the final sequences that are almost magically complimented by the happy accident of a totally unexpected snowfall, and the result is a surprisingly moving piece about fundamentally shallow people. And it is a very comforting thought that, if behind every book is a man (or woman), then somewhere there is a man or woman who will keep every book alive despite all efforts to destroy it.

Universal's DVD is one of the very best on the market: the audio commentary is occassionally unsatisfying, but any gaps are more than filled in by the excellent 45-minute documentary, interview with Ray Bradbury, featurette on Herrmann's score, alternate title sequence, stills and poster gallery and trailer. Highly recommended.

A quick note to let fans of this underrated film know that the DVD edition contains an illuminating making-of (almost an hour-long with comments and anecdotes from producer Lewis M. Allen, editor Thom Noble, author Ray Bradbury and Truffaut specialist Annette Insdorf -- you even get glimpses of Francois Truffaut at work), a terrific interview with Ray Bradbury, another with Bernard Herrmann's biographer regarding the haunting soundtrack, a wonderful poster & stills gallery, an unusual trailer, an alternate opening credit sequence (a woman's voice is heard instead of Alex Scott's voice) and, creme de la creme, an audio commentary by Julie Christie. Hours and hours of fun & discovery which makes this DVD a great addition to your library.

The movie "Fahrenheit 451" has always been regarded as a strange, stiff movie, curious not only in the casting, but also in the stilted feelings of the main character and abrupt changes in pacing. I think that is part of its appeal.

Ever since it's release in the mid 1960's the film has had a special appeal to the 10 year old in me. From the afternoon movie appearances on WXYZ TV 7 4:30 pm Movie (edited for time, commercial content, and any suggestion of sexual content) to the occassional late night replay, it's a facinating look at a future society of rules, regulation, control and totalitarianism run rampant.

True, it is difficult to understand Oscar(Montag)Werner's speech at times, and you wonder how he ever linked up with Linda/Julie Christie in the first place... but I think that only helps to underscore his growing sense of not-fitting it, not belonging, alienation, and loneliness. His dying love for her is evident in his frantic attempts to save her, but even in that effort, while the technicians work to casually revive her in the next room, he can only listen in... not actually DO anything to help save the woman he married... as she is restored to a participating member of 'the family'.

There are many images that stay with me, some 35 years since I first saw the film. I frequently remember the run for darkness in front of the apartment complex/condos... and the errie predictive precursor to "America's Most Wanted" program.... "Let every citizen stand at his front door and watch for...Guy Montag..."

In this modern day of MTV, the obsession with mindless reality shows like "Dog Eat Dog", "Fear Factor" and "The Real World"... we have to wonder how close we have grown to this futuristic world of mind-numbing cable television. As the 80s rock band "The Tubes" said, "What do you want from Life? To get cable TV and watch it every night?"

This movie, as awkward as it is and always has been, should be required viewing for every high school literature class... in the hopes that some of the brighter students will recognise their classmates and the dangers of becoming one of the "family".

By the way, did you hear that the new plazma wide screen TV's are coming down in price? If you rush now, you can buy a second one for Christmas and install it in your family room... then you'll only need two more before you are completely immersed in cable TV 24/7.....

Think about it.

Thank you Mr. Ray Bradbury, Mr. Francis Trufau, Mr. Bernard Hermann, Mr. Guy Montag...