Francois Truffaut's 1966 film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel is a hard film to address. It gets the novel's themes across well-enough, but the pretty pictures and optimistic tone are completely at variance wtih Bradbury's vision. The result is an interesting film that might be better if it weren't based on a classic novel.
Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) is a fireman in a dystopian London where books are outlawed and burned. His wife Linda (Julie Christie) has surrendered entirely to the super-materialistic society, and Guy himself doesn't think much about his work either way - even though he's up for promotion. But a chance encounter with a chatty young girl, Clarisse (also Christie), convinces him that there might be something to this book business. Soon Guy starts to read and feels an urge to rebel, though he must find confront his domineering boss (Cyril Cusack) first.
I'm a big fan of Ray Bradbury, but I find Fahrenherit 451 a middling work. Bradbury is more concerned with the loss of literature and thought than politics, a recurring motif through his work (The Exiles, Usher II) and the film retains this theme. The closing scenes with the "Book People," devoted to memorizing great books for posterity, really brings the author's love of literature to life, and the constant burning of Melville, Sartre, Kant and Cahiers du Cinema (ha!) becomes painful to watch. Even if derivative of Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's depiction of a media-saturated culture, obsessed with television, music and visual gratification, rings strikingly true today. Books may be meaningless, as the Captain sneers, but they encourage thought and creativity; Linda's insipid interactive TV games and pill-popping encourages staid conformity and sloth.
The film remains faithful to Bradbury for the first hour or so, but goes way off the rails towards the end. Clarisse was a minor (if important) character in the book, but in the film she's unaccountably bumped up to co-star and love interest. Key elements like the Mechanical Hound (a poison-injecting police dog), and more importantly a perpetual world war, are excised entirely. Though we do get cops whizzing around in jetpacks, which is fun. Losing Bradbury's grim, apocalyptic finale, Truffaut goes for a cheerily optimistic ending that just doesn't fit.
Francois Truffaut, one of the New Wave's leading lights, provides fine direction that somehow seems wrong for the material. With the help of Nicolas Roeg's gorgeous Technicolor photography and Bernard Herrman's rapturous score, Truffaut mounts a strikingly beautiful production, which works against the story's grim atmosphere. If ever a film cried out for stark black-and-white photography, it's this one; and yet Truffaut creates so many beautiful, striking images (especially a closet bookworm's (Bee Duffel) sacrifice, and the burning books curling like flower petals) that I'm loathe to part with the Technicolor.
The cast is a mixed bag. Oskar Werner makes a rather bland and one-note hero. Julie Christie (Doctor Zhivago) is good in both her roles, though the need for a dual performance is never made clear. Cyril Cusack (The Day of the Jackal) steals the show as a particularly loathsome bureaucrat. Anton Diffring (Where Eagles Dare) does little more than glower menacingly from the sidelines, but Bee Duffel (A Night to Remember) makes a strong impression in her tiny part.
On the whole, I'm not sure what to make of Fahrenheit 451. It's a beautiful film with a story that oughtn't be beautiful - that's what we call a conundrum.
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