‘To learn how to find, one must first learn how to hide...’
Along with Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is one of the key dystopian texts. François Truffaut, beloved of Hitchcock and one of the filmmakers at the vanguard of the French New Wave movement, is considered a cinematic genius. The combination of Bradbury’s novel and Truffaut’s assured direction could have made for an all timer. In the end, it’s merely pretty good…
Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) is a ‘fireman’ in an oppressive near future. Rather than putting out fires, however, his job is to burn. Specifically, to burn books. In an effort to make everybody the same, books are banned in this world, with the masses instead encouraged to stare at their TV screens all day. After a chance meeting with Clarisse (Julie Christie), a spirited teacher, Montag begins to question why the books must be burned, and if they should be burned at all. Meanwhile, Montag is promised a promotion by his coldhearted superior, Captain Beatty (Cyril Cusack), much to the delight of Montag’s dead-eyed wife, Linda (also played by Christie).
There is loads of great stuff here. Truffaut borrowed Hitchcock’s longtime composer Bernard Herrmann to produce a score, and it is truly some of his best work. While it does borrow liberally from the score from Psycho, all ominous strings and dramatic overtures, it is still very much its own thing, and it certainly elevates this curious adaptation to something approaching classic status. Werner and particularly Cusack are excellent. The former blank and vacant when he needs to be, and yet still passionate and brimming with emotion when called for, while the latter steals every scene in which he appears, particularly one chilling and prescient moment in which a library is discovered. Cusack explains why all the books are pointless in what is a terrifying monologue that has sadly never been more timely in these troubled and anti-intellectual times in which we live. Christie fares less well, with the decision for her to play two different characters never really justified.
The other issue is that the film rather… peters out. The final moments are typiclly stylish and innovative and… well… French, but the third act never threatens to match the intensity of the novel, despite an excellent showdown scene that plays out just before the film’s coda.
Fahrenheit 451 is a fascinating combination of two very different worlds, but it also occasionally feels like an awkward fit – a film that has moments of greatness, but one that never lives up to its early promise.
