Fahrenheit 451 – 1966 | 110mins | Drama, Sci-Fi | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 was made at Pinewood Studios in 1966 under a short-lived policy by Universal to bring European directors to British studios. Fahrenheit 451 was from Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction novel about a world in the future which no longer permits books, and the struggle of an independent thinker to defeat the regime. Oskar Werner played a fireman (in this future period the firemen were employed in starting, not extinguishing, fires of books), who begins to read the works he is ordered to destroy. Betrayed by his wife, one of two roles played by Julie Christie, he is lured by another girl in her image to a different community, a primitive tribe of forest-dwellers, all of whom have chosen to commit a classic literary work to memory, so that it can be transmitted to future generations.

The film followed the usual Truffaut introversion, the close-up of a loner against an implacable society, the individual who seeks an alternative to the society in which he finds himself – a theme distinct in his work from his first feature, Les Quatre Cents Coups. Eschewing the methods usually employed in science-fiction films, with complex and far-fetched gadgetry and costumes, the world in this film looked disturbingly normal, although it was meant to be a long way into another age. The neat housing estates and modish clothes worn by Julie Christie are of our own time – it is the behaviour and the sterile attitudes of people that are alien, although they are really extensions or projections of contemporary attitudes.

Science fiction is essentially fable-like and this Bradbury story is an excellent example, though curiously, less spectacularly conceived in film terms than Bradbury’s original book.