| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
FAHRENHEIT 451
Rating: 
UK. 1966.
Director – Francois Truffaut, Screenplay – Francois Truffaut & Jean-Louis Richard, Additional Dialogue – David Rudkin & Helen Scott, Based on the Novel by Ray Bradbury, Producer – Lewis M. Allen, Photography – Nicolas Roeg, Music – Bernard Hermann, Special Effects – Bowie Films & Charles Staffel, Production Design – Syd Cain. Production Company – Enterprise Vineyards.
Cast:
Oskar Werner (Montag), Julie Christie (Linda Montag/Clarisse), Cyril Cusack (Captain), Anton Diffring (Fabian), Jeremy Spenser (Leader of the Book People), Bee Duffell (Book Woman)
Plot: In the future books have been outlawed as reading is thought to only lead to idealism, which brings dissent, unrest and unhappiness. A special police force known as Firemen locate and burn caches of illegal books. Montag is one such Fireman. He has no reason to doubt what he does until Clarisse, the schoolteacher who lives next door to him, asks him if he ever reads any of the books he burns. His curiosity piqued, Montag steals a book on his next call and starts to read it in secrecy. Firemen raid Clarisse’s house, but she escapes and tells Montag of a colony of people devoted to keeping books alive by memorizing them. Montag goes to quit his job but the Fire Chief persuades him to come on one last job, which turns out to be his own house. However Montag turns his flame-thrower on the Firemen and becomes a fugitive.
Fahrenheit 451 comes from Francois Truffaut, one of the leading luminaries of the French New Wave of the 1960s. Truffaut had made acclaimed films such as The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules and Jim (1962) and would go onto the likes of the Hitchcock-influenced The Bride Wore Black (1967), The Wild Child (1969), Day for Night (1973) and The Story of Adele H. (1975). With Fahrenheit 451, Truffaut turned to the work of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury had become one of the great mainstream crossover successes of the 1950s, writing classics such as The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1951), Dandelion Wine (1957) and short story collections such as Dark Carnival (1947), The Illustrated Man (1951) and The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953). Ray Bradbury’s work always evokes a melancholic nostalgia for lost American childhoods and comes with a sentimentalized idealism that extols simple-mindedness and tradition and distrusts change and technology. Francois Truffaut by comparison is one of the more soberly intellectual of the directors to emerge out of the New Wave, an ironist rather than a sentimentalist. Truffaut had originally wanted to film stories from The Illustrated Man but decided instead to adapt Fahrenheit 451. And Fahrenheit 451 ended up being, beyond the very loose adaptation of Bradbury’s short story The Foghorn (1951) into a single image in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the first time one of Bradbury’s works had been adapted to the screen.
Much has been debated about whether the film does Ray Bradbury’s book justice. But with all due respect, Truffaut never had a book that seemed that credible in the first place. Bradbury never sketched out how his society could have come into existence. For instance, you wonder why this society spends so much time burning books – wouldn’t the easiest way to stop people reading be to cultivate illiteracy? The art of reading is a learned one where people actively have to expend time learning the language and how to interpret the symbols that make up letters and words – for the people of this future society to be able to engage in the forbidden act of reading, there must have been some society-wide mechanism to teach them to read in the first place. You ask other questions like – how does this society keep records, for instance? We see a scene where the police are tipped off by receiving someone’s photo in lieu of a name – but how is more complex data such as bank records and official information kept? In the film Truffaut never embellishes the world and leaves it a colourless milieu that lives in a vacuum. One can perhaps argue that Fahrenheit 451 is a cautionary story, so it doesn’t need to be realistic.
Certainly the film adaptation makes the story far more ambiguous than Ray Bradbury ever did in the book. The book ends with a nuclear holocaust taking place, leaving the Book People as civilization’s hope for the future. Here the holocaust is dropped, leaving that hope only a faint one. And while Bradbury regards the issue of book-burning and the loss of imagination and literacy by the society of the future as one of idealistic outrage, Francois Truffaut makes the case less black-and-white. He makes the point when he moves into closeup on the books that are going onto the bonfire, which include not just the literary classics but also copies of Mein Kampf, De Sade and Nietzsche. It’s a point that obliquely criticizes Bradbury’s blanket worship and commemoration of all literature irrespective of what.
Ray Bradbury was in all likelihood inspired by the book-burnings that went on under the Nazis and his work is ‘lit up’ by the outrage at the loss of literacy and imagination that such a world might hold. But for Francois Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451 is really less about taking a stand in a totalitarian future than it is one about rebelling against a cloying middle-class lifestyle. We get the sense that what causes Oskar Werner to become a revolutionary and start reading books is not intellectual curiosity but a desire to find imaginative life in contrast to the numbness of the pill-popping, soap opera-addicted world of his housewife. Truffaut has both Oskar Werner’s wife and the revolutionary schoolteacher played by the same actress, Julie Christie, which serves to symbolize that the two women in Werner’s life are mirror opposites – the wife represents a banal, narcotized middle-class existence; the schoolteacher represents intellectual vibrancy and life. And when Montag takes up the books and starts reading, it is like a challenge to his bourgeois values – Truffaut improvises a scene over Ray Bradbury where Oskar Werner brings out one of his books and starts defiantly reading it in front of his wife’s middle class tea parties, and the ending where Werner torches his own house contains a perverse pleasure on Truffaut’s part in the way he drinks in the torching of the bedroom and lounge in sensuous detail, for it is really the joyous incineration of an entire way of life.
Dramatically and in terms of characters, the film comes out somewhat hesitantly. Oskar Werner, who speaks with a thick (Austrian) accent, makes a singularly boring hero. The romance between he and Julie Christie’s equally underdeveloped schoolteacher never gets fired up. A sense of satirical humour, in the scenes with Julie Christie as the wife and the participatory tv soap opera or the two blase medical technicians come to pump Christie’s stomach after a suicide attempt, lurks without clearly emerging.
But where the film does make up is in the bold alacrity with which Francois Truffaut tackles the visuals. There’s a marvelous opening scene of book raid that is conducted in a series of precise dramatic shots with the red fire engine buzzing through the countryside, the Firemen breaking into the house and burning the books, all accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s stirring score. It sets the scene for the film perfectly. Truffaut is interested in the flames the Firemen light just as much the dialectic of ideals, and the film is filled with wonderfully colourful, often beautiful images – Bee Duffell’s decision to throw herself on the bonfire of her books; one charming silent vignette where Werner and Christie watch a man unsure whether to make a tipoff or not; and the pretty ending, which often moves people as much as it causes them to laugh, as the Book People wander amid the snowy trees reciting books to themselves. On camera Truffaut has Nicolas Roeg, later to become an acclaimed director – see the genre likes of Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) – who makes some wonderfully exciting contrasts of bold, primary colour. Hitchcock’s composer Bernard Herrmann contributes an immensely exciting score.
Fahrenheit 451 was Francois Truffaut’s only ever venture into genre cinema. His one other genre credit of note was as performance as the UFO expert in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). His film The Wild Child (1969), with its true-life story of a child that lived in the wild, has had some minor influence on the genre, most notably as a realist contrast to the ape man myth of Tarzan.
In the 1990s and 2000s both Mel Gibson and Frank Darabont have promised to direct a remake of Fahrenheit 451. Other Ray Bradbury screen adaptations are:– the aforementioned The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) from his short story The Foghorn; the alien invader classic It Came from Outer Space (1953) from his original screenplay; The Illustrated Man (1968) from his short story collection; the dreary The Martian Chronicles tv mini-series (1979) from his classic book; the tv movie The Electric Grandmother (1980); the screenplay for the fine Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) from his own novel; a Russian-made Bradbury anthology The Veldt (1987); his screenplay for the animated adaptation of the classic comic-strip Little Nemo in Slumberland (1992); the tv anthology series The Ray Bradbury Theater (1986-92) where he adapted his own stories and hosted the series; the screenplay for the animated childrens film The Halloween Tree (1993); Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998); and A Sound of Thunder (2005) based on Bradbury’s classic time travel story.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2002
|