Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Directed by François Truffaut

Film Review

Of all the films that François Truffaut made, the one that is least typical is his 1966 film Fahrenheit 451, the first of his two forays into science-fiction (the second being his guest appearance in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Most serious fans of Truffaut's work tend to give this film a wide berth, partly because it is a genre film, partly because it is in English (the only one of his films to have been recorded entirely in English), and partly because its failings have been too well publicised.  Its production was the most protracted and fraught of Truffaut's entire career and its failure, both critically and commercially, was a major setback for the most prominent filmmaker of the French New Wave.  It is a film that is easy to overlook, but it has the signficance of being the first film that Truffaut made in colour.

Truffaut's obsession with making this film dates back to 1960, when producer Raoul Lévy lent him a copy of Ray Bradbury's famous novel of the same title.   Although he had no prior interest in science-fiction, Truffaut was both fascinated and disturbed by the central premise of the novel, the idea that at some point in the future the written word might become outlawed and books routinely burned, as part of a malign state's strategy to obliterate the individual.  For Truffaut, a rabid bibliophile, it was a vision of Hell, and he saw immediately its dramatic and visual possibilities, particularly as it evoked strong memories of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust.   During his American tour to promote Jules et Jim in the spring of 1962, Truffaut arranged to meet Ray Bradbury in New York.  Bradbury had little interest in adapting Fahrenheit 451 and tried to persuade Truffaut to instead work with him on a film version of his Martian Chronicles.  When the director declined, Bradbury agreed to sell him the rights to Fahrenheit 451, but refused to contribute to the screenplay.

Truffaut initially envisaged making the film in French, with Jean-Paul Belmondo playing the lead character Montag.  When Belmondo demanded an exorbitant fee, the director opted instead for Charles Aznavour, with whom he had worked successfully on his second film, Tirez sur le pianiste (1960).  The script went through four drafts (at one point the unknown Maurice Pialat was very nearly roped in as a screenwriter) and Truffaut finally succeeded in finding a producer, Henry Deutschmeister, to stump up two-thirds of the 3 million franc budget.  When the film failed to find a distributor, Deutschmeister withdrew his support and the project collapsed.  To keep his company, Les Films du Carrosse, solvent, Truffaut was compelled to dash out another film, La Peau Douce, on a minuscule budget.  Although this film is now considered to be among the director's finest, it was a commercial and critical flop when it was first released in 1964.  Truffaut's financial woes were further aggravated when his wealthy mother-in-law declined to continue supporting his business after the break-up of his marriage to Madeleine Morgenstern.  When, in 1965, Les Films du Carrosse lost a plagiarism suit relating to Jean-Louis Richard's film Mata-Hari, Truffaut's funds were virtually depleted.

The one ray of hope that came during this troubled period was an invitation from the American film producer Lewis Allen to direct a film about the infamous exploits of the gangster couple Bonnie and Clyde.  Although Truffaut liked the script, he was nervous about having to make a film in America.  His command of English was poor and he had great reservations about the American system of making films, which was too commercialised and star-centric for his taste.  After several months of deliberation, he declined to direct Bonnie and Clyde, and once he had failed to convince his friend Jean-Luc Godard to direct the film it fell into the lap of up-and-coming American filmmaker Arthur Penn.  This proved to be the biggest missed opportunity of Truffaut's career.  Starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, Penn's Bonnie and Clyde was to be one of the most successful films of the decade, a seminal film of the American counter-culture movement.

Lewis Allen, a great fan of the French New Wave, allowed Truffaut to talk him into producing Fahrenheit 451.  Truffaut's script was translated into English and the film temporarily re-titled The Phenix.  Paul Newman was originally approached to play the lead character, but he later pulled out and was replaced by Terence Stamp, an actor Truffaut greatly admired.  For the role of the fireman captain, the main villain of the piece, Truffaut cast Oskar Werner, now famous after his appearance in Jules et Jim, whilst Jane Fonda and Julie Christie were contracted to play the two female characters, Clarisse and Linda.  Filming was to commence in America early in the summer of 1964, and the budget set at 900,000 dollars.  Following further negotiations with MCA (a European subsidiary of Universal), the shooting date was put back to January 1966 and the filming was to take place in England, at Pinewood studios.

It was then that Truffaut had the bright idea of getting the same actress (Julie Christie) to play the two lead female roles (an idea, which in retrospect, was a mistake as it weakens the film's integrity by taking the focus away from its main character).  This decision upset Terence Stamp, who walked away from the project in disgust.  Oskar Werner was hired as his replacement, and the role of the fireman captain ultimately went to the Irish character actor Cyril Cusack.  Anton Diffring, an actor who was used to playing vicious Nazi-types, was cast as one of the more sadistic firemen, Fabian.   Seven year old Mark Lester was given a small part in the film, a year before he secured the role that was to make him an instant star, in Carol Reed's Oliver! (1968).  The composer Bernard Herrmann, a frequent collaborator of Truffaut's hero Alfred Hitchcock, was to score the film, and Nicholas Roeg was assigned director of photography, just a few years before he became a notable film director in his own right.

With nothing better to do in the evenings, Truffaut kept a diary in which he meticulously recounted the events of the day's shooting.  This diary sheds considerable light on the troubled production and was first published by the Cahiers du cinéma shortly after the film was released.  Truffaut was fulsome in his praise of the professionalism of the staff at Pinewood studios.  The only bugbear was having to work around the very limiting (and often quite absurd) union rules.  Truffaut's principal bête noire was his lead male actor.  Right from the outset, Truffaut and Oskar Werner were at loggerheads and their relationship rapidly deteriorated during the making of the film.

Werner was insistent that he should play Montag as a hero, but Truffaut had no interest in heroism and saw the character in a more passive light.  Werner refused point-blank to participate in one of the more dramatic scenes because he felt it was too dangerous.  More than once, he failed to turn up on set, and Truffaut had to resort to threats, telling Werner that unless he was more cooperative his scenes would be given to his stunt double.  The last straw was when Werner turned up with the back of his head shaved - Truffaut had no choice but to use his double and force Werner to wear a cap, shooting him only from the front.  It later transpired that Werner was suffering from a severe lack of confidence, perhaps brought about by a declining state in his mental health and the onset of alcoholism.  Werner's antipathy for the film may also have been a subconscious reaction to having to play a pseudo-Nazi character - in his youth he had been a staunch pacifist and had actively opposed Nazism.  Had he known any of this, Truffaut may have been more sympathetic.  Instead, he imagined that Werner had simply set his mind on sabotaging the film and treated him accordingly.

The other fly in the ointment was the capricious British weather, which created endless problems for the recording of the important closing scenes at Black Park, near to Pinewood studios (the location of many a Hammer horror film).  A sudden unexpected snowfall proved to be a blessing in disguise and provided the film with a far more poetic and photogenic ending than the one which had originally been planned.  During the exhausting six month shoot (which was completed in July 1966), Truffaut took time out to record a few sequences in France.  Châteauneuf-sur-Loire provided the location for the scenes with the suspended monorails, the main futuristic element of the film.

When he saw the film, Ray Bradbury was greatly impressed and wrote a letter thanking Truffaut for delivering such a faithful adaptation of his book.  The critics and cinema-going public were far less generous.  In France, the reviews were almost universally scathing and the film bombed at the box office, failing to an attract an audience of 200,000.  The film fared little better on its American release.  Fahrenheit 451 was to be one of François Truffaut's biggest critical and commercial failures and was a film which the director was keen to forget.  Today, the film is held in somewhat higher esteem and now rates as a minor classic of the science-fiction genre.  Paradoxically, whilst it is Truffaut's best-known film, it is the one entry in his oeuvre that his fondest admirers feel compelled to ignore.

Fahrenheit 451 is a film that is easy to fault.  Its special effects are risible (particularly the awful travelling matte sequence in which firemen, visibly suspended by wires, hover over a lake in pursuit of Montag) and these, coupled with the paucity of convincing futuristic elements and lacklustre performances, make the film look cheap and tacky.  Oskar Werner's diction is so poor that you have to strain your ears to understand much of what he says (you wonder why he wasn't dubbed), and his chemistry with co-star Julie Christie is next to non-existent.  On the plus side, Cyril Cusack is superb as the fireman captain; far from being the conventional villain, he has a seductive matey charm and his arguments for obliterating the printed word are frighteningly persuasive.  Nicholas Roeg's cinematography and Bernard Herrmann's score are typically inspired and work together to create a distinctly Hitchcockian sense of oppression and paranoia - Montag's dream sequence is particularly well-realised and echoes that seen in Vertigo (1958).

The pièce(s) de résistance are the sequences in which the books are set alight and filmed as if they are people being burned alive.  You can almost hear the books scream as the pages char and catch light, their printed content shouting out at us in silent terror; the atrocity becomes more viscerally shocking, more difficult to watch, with each successive repetition.  By the end of the film, you'll end up believing that books really do have souls.  Is the film pure fantasy or a vision of what is to come?  As the visual media continue to impinge on our lives, gradually diminishing the importance of the printed word and driving publishers out of business, perhaps Fahrenheit 451's dystopian portrait of a world without books isn't so far off.  Who needs flame-throwing firemen to expunge our precious tomes when we have Kindle?

Film Synopsis

In the near future, the printed word has become outlawed.  With every home equipped with video screens, there is no need for written communication.  Books have long since been banned, but there are still a few sick social deviants who insist on keeping them.   This is why squads of implacable firemen patrol the land, seeking out books and burning them without mercy.  One such fireman is Montag.  He enjoys his work and is happily married, to Linda.  One day, he hopes to be promoted, so that his house may acquire a second video screen.  A chance encounter with another woman will change Montag's  life forever.  Clarisse despises the work that Montag does, and yet she is drawn to him.  She awakens in the fireman a curiosity for books that he has never experienced before.  In secret, Montag begins to acquire books and starts to read.  In doing so, he discovers something wonderful, a world that is far more meaningful than the one he is used to.  When she uncovers Montag's secret passion, Linda is appalled.  Sickened by her husband's dangerous perversion, she makes up her mind to betray him...