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44 out of 49 people found the following review useful: An excellent adaptation of a great novel., 14 May 2004 Author: panamajaq04 from San Francisco, California
In a future where books have been outlawed, firemen are paid to burn books instead of put fires out. However, one fireman realizes that what he is doing is wrong and decides to go against the degenerate society he lives in.I have read reviews of this movie calling it "boring" and "outdated," and frankly I am amazed by how ignorant some people can be. Calling "Fahrenheit 451" outdated simply because the set designs look old and because there are no flashy computer effects shows that you have completely missed the point. The people who made this were not trying to give you a spectacle, they were trying to give you a message - a message that is even more important today than it was when this movie came out."Fahrenheit 451" is a fine adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic novel about censorship. The movie changes many of the book's events, but the spirit of the book is preserved. The cinematography is truly great and the score is quite powerful. The acting is also great. Oskar Werner is right on the money as Montag the fireman. Julie Christie is wonderful playing dual roles as yin and yang: Montag's zombie-like wife, Linda, and Montag's friend, the young and energetic Clarisse. Cyril Cusack is also memorable as the evil Fire Captain Beatty - he isn't a cartoon villain, but a very realistic and human character.You may think that "Fahrenheit 451" delivers an irrelevant message. You may think that book burning is a thing of the past, a relic of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Look around you - book burning happens every day! How do you feel about people trying to ban "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" because the word "nigger" is used in it? How about whole sections of "Doctor Dolittle" being rewritten so that they are politically correct? Did you know that school textbooks may not make any mention of Mount Rushmore because it is offensive to a certain Indian tribe? Meanwhile, we are watching our giant-screen TVs and listening to our Walkmans (two inventions that were predicted by Bradbury). We are constantly "plugged in" and never take any time to just sit and think. Look around you - Ray Bradbury's story is coming true. I advise you to watch this movie, and to read the book. (Read the book first. You will appreciate the film more.)I hear that a remake is in the works. No doubt it will be filled with gaudy special effects and silly Hollywood cliches. I guess I should hold off judgment until I actually see it, but I doubt that it will contain any of the genius that can be found in this sadly underrated gem. It will be interesting to see what they do with the mechanical hound, though....
38 out of 48 people found the following review useful: visionary brilliance, 6 January 2005 Author: Jonny_Numb from Hellfudge, Pennsylvania
Go figure that I had the privilege of seeing "Fahrenheit 451," for free, on a big screen a few years back (an independent Illinois art house had gotten hold of what was allegedly one of the last surviving prints), and at the time hadn't the foggiest concept of how PRIVILEGED an event it was. Sitting in a theater crowded with college students on a budget with nothing better to do, I watched this diverting little retro item, appreciated its subtlety, nuance, bold visual style, and 'got' the message that if we're not careful, we'll be mindless drones having our desires dictated by The Tube (in current times, that's hardly a profound statement).Francois Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel is a bold visual feast that presents a time that might seem 'retrograde' in the eye of a modern pop-culture snob, but ultimately projects what a conceivable 'future' might look like (and not that CGI malarkey served up in "The Matrix"). Interiors of houses are awash in odd colors and give shelter to appliances that don't look dissimilar from our own; TV screens embedded in living-room walls play programs which vacuous housewives interact with sometimes. The film is so relentlessly confident in its appearance that it withstands the test of time.Though if "Fahrenheit 451" only had its storybook style to rely on, it would fade and be filed away as a mere technical achievement. Truffaut, working from strong source material, concocts a riveting parable about ignorance and the things we, as humans, take for granted. The story follows Guy Montag, an Everyman who is employed as a fireman--a connotation which entails ransacking residences in search of books (reading and writing have been outlawed in this world) and burning them. He has a medicated-smile wife (Julie Christie), a quiet home life, and is in line for a promotion, until a neighbor (Christie again) inspires him to question his motives for working such a sordid job.One character argues that books cause depression, making people confront unpleasant feelings. "Fahrenheit 451" sometimes runs the risk of lending truth to that statement--in some ways, it is a bleak commentary on civilization, but at the same time grounded in a benevolent humanity that offsets Orwell's brutal, pessimistic world of "1984" (though both texts and films share similar themes). This humanity is underlined in an upbeat, even comic ending (the details of which I won't divulge here)."Fahrenheit 451" is a spellbinding work of art, in good company with other incendiary works ("A Clockwork Orange" and "Fight Club" come to mind) that have defied the constraints of time and age.
37 out of 47 people found the following review useful: Engrossing, underrated sci-fi, 9 April 2005 Author: moonspinner55 from redlands, ca
From Ray Bradbury's novel about totalitarian society that has banned books and printed words in order to eliminate independent thought; Oskar Werner plays professional book-burner who becomes enraptured with stories. Possibly a bit too thin at this length, but a fascinating peek at a cold future (which the times have just about caught up to). Didn't get a warm reception from critics in its day, yet the performances by Werner and Julie Christie (in a dual role as both Werner's wife and his rebel girlfriend) are top notch. I was never a fan of director Francois Truffaut's too-precious stories of childhood, but this film, curiously his only English-language picture, is extremely well-directed; the sequence with the woman and her books afire is one amazing set-piece, with tight editing, incredible and precise art direction, and the camera in all the right places. Truffaut lets you feel the agony of book paper curling up black in a mass of orange flames, and the proud defiance of the woman as she herself strikes the match. Unforgettable. ***1/2 from ****
25 out of 29 people found the following review useful: Imagine a world without books...., 12 May 2005 Author: Billie from United States
Fahrenheit 451" is a strange film, hard to describe. No one could have interpreted the classic Bradbury novel in the same bizarre, fascinating manner as Francois Truffaut. It's a book, and a film, about freedom, choices, individuality, and intellectual repression in a future where books are forbidden; where Firemen are men who start fires...fires in which they burn books.It was also the first color film directed by Truffaut. Although he by all accounts was not happy about making a color film and found it a bit unsettling, color is used to great effect here; sparingly, except for the extreme shade of red that is seen throughout."Fahrenheit 451" is supposed to be the temperature at which book paper catches fire, as the protagonist Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) explains in a scene at the beginning. Guy is a Fireman who seems happy enough with his life until he is approached by a young woman named Clarisse (Julie Christie) on his way home from work one day. She starts up a conversation with him, and the two become friendly. She bewilders him but challenges him to think and feel....and read. And when he arrives home we see his wife (also played by Julie Christie, with long hair), sedated and watching the wallscreen (TV of sorts)...we see what his life is really like, although he had told Clarisse he was "happy"...he is not.As his friendship with Clarisse grows, he starts to secretly take home, hoard, and read some of the books he finds in the course of his daily work, and as he reads, he becomes obsessed with the books. They become his mistress, and are what finally make him feel affection and warmth. And when he starts to feel and care, so do we.The two single best scenes are a passionate one involving an old woman who refuses to leave her books, her "children" as she calls them; and the wonderful ending of the film. The countless, painful closeups of books as they are being burned are beautifully done, and difficult to watch.Truffaut was a well-known disciple of Alfred Hitchcock's films, so when Hitchcock fired his long-time music collaborator Bernard Herrmann during the filming of "Torn Curtain", Truffaut was thrilled to acquire his talents for his own film. The score for "F451" is beautiful, and the film would not be nearly as effective without it.Writer/producer/director Frank Darabont ("The Green Mile", "The Shawshank Redemption") is working on a new film of "Fahrenheit 451" this year. He says it won't be a remake of the original film.
31 out of 46 people found the following review useful: A cautionary tale for our times, 28 July 2004 Author: jonr-3 from Kansas City, Missouri, USA
My first viewing of "Fahrenheit 451" since its initial relase ca. 1966 was last night, via DVD. I highly recommend this DVD version--it includes excellent bonus material, including a moving account of composer Bernard Herrman's role in making the film. I rated the film a "9" despite not being a big Truffaut fan; there's something about the "feel" of his movies that makes me fidgety and leaves me dissatisfied. But that same feel seems just right in this atypical piece of his--he felt he had failed to make the movie right, and he had difficulties with it that are explained in the bonus material. I think what resulted was an unsuspected and unintended success, instead.Now more than ever in recent history, we face problems with individual liberties that are uncannily reflected in this film. Watch it as a cautionary tale, as a visually stunning experience, and as an example of some of the best film music ever composed: but watch it. I think you'll be glad you did.
20 out of 25 people found the following review useful: An Underrated Movie, 6 July 2000 Author: dusted1 from Portland, OR
Yes, the movie is slow. Yes, the sets and the costumes are very 60ish and very dated. But it has something to say.Its depiction of a narcissistic, alienated, superficial, mass media lobotomized culture might ring true for more than a few of us. The movie also shows the fireman's wife as being addicted to downers/uppers. All of the "normal" human relations that are shown in the movie appear to be detached and lacking emotion.People are not to trouble themselves with unpleasant thoughts or feelings. Hence, the banning of books and literature. They bring up unpleasant, sad, and depressing subjects. They depict too much of life as it actually is. This is troubling to people. Consequently, the government pushes drugs, emotion-free and sanitized sex, and witless mass media. There is more than a little resemblance to our society of the year 2000 and heaven knows what the future will bring.Oskar Werner is one my favorites, so I'm very prejudiced, but I think he does an excellent job. I think both Truffaut and Werner wanted the audience to see the fireman's partial dehumanization. He recovers much of that humanity as the film progresses. The supporting cast was good, especially the actor who played the fire chief. Julie Christie was good in the film, too, although her self-conscious woodenness or manner bothered me more than Werner's.Perhaps something less than one of the great films. But it is a very thoughtful film with a lot to say to its audience--although some viewers choose to focus only on its rather dated veneer.
20 out of 28 people found the following review useful: Reading is fundamental, 21 July 2004 Author: BumpyRide from TCM's Basement
After reading several whinny comments about how the movie is so different from the book I just had to add my two cents. Hello people! These are two different mediums here, like comparing Katherine Hepburn to Audrey Hepburn. They are two different entities which stand alone on their own merits.I read the book years and years ago, and frankly, I don't remember much about it. I'd seen the movie in years past, and it never knocked my socks off. But upon viewing it last night, I have to say I found myself thoroughly engrossed in it. The scene in the monorail where all the passengers are trying to stimulate themselves through their sense of touch is quite moving. As is the neighbor who declares, "They aren't like us, are they?"It's never going to be a movie in which you want to see over and over again (like the fluffy Wizard of Oz, again a book that is totally different from the movie, where are the complaining people now?) but it's a movie that should be seen. I also wonder how many people will complain when the new version comes out? I can hear them now, "The first movie was so much better!"
14 out of 17 people found the following review useful: Fahrenheit 451 -- On the Web, the Paper Does Not Have to Burn, 26 February 2006 Author: Max A. Lebow from United States
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
This film first appeared in theaters in 1966. The Vietnam War was just getting under way. The Pentagon was beefing up its disinformation campaign that was later documented in David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest. The film is based on a novel by Ray Bradbury, first published in 1953, when the hysterical Red Scares of McCarthyism were near their peak.Bradbury's writing was originally published in the second issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine. In an interview, Bradbury claims that Fahrenheit 451 was his only work of science fiction.That the "New Wave" director, Francois Truffaut agreed to direct the film was unusual. Bradbury was already an established writer, who probably wanted some artistic control, but Truffaut was promoting the auteur theory of film in which the director has absolute artistic control.The friction had a couple of effects on the film. Truffaut, eager to begin filming wrote the screenplay before fully mastering English. Even Truffaut was disappointed in the end with the stiff, flat dialog. For Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451 was his first, and last, English-language film. This may have contributed to the flatness of the characters.Some reviewers made an asset out of the stiffness by saying that the characters, deprived of serious thinking, and of books, and addled by drugs, were themselves, in fact, flat, soulless creatures.The central character, Guy Montag, (Oskar Werner) is a "fireman." In this disturbing vision of the future, firemen burn books. Books are all but banned by the government because they have "conflicting ideas" in them. Those ideas can make people unhappy. It is the government's job to keep people happy, with drugs, large-screen television, and other entertainment.Let's keep it positive.The novel played on the concerns of the time when it was written. Censorship and suppression of thought, mainly through intimidation, was being exercised in the United States. The intimidation was being done by radio and newspaper columnists, who supported Senator Joe McCarthy. The book burnings by Nazis, which started in Germany in 1933 and continued until the end of World War II, were still in living memory. And the world was still reeling from the horrible pictures of the explosions of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as implications of the mass production of nuclear weapons.By the time the film appeared, America was more concerned with race riots. So, burning was a viscerally powerful theme. Lost on most viewers in 1966 was the detail that among the burned books was the film journal Cahiers du Cinema for which Truffaut wrote, and that on the magazine's cover was a picture from the film Breathless, written by Truffaut. Also among the burned books: The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, both written by Bradbury.SPOILER ALERT Truffaut, however, contributed much to the uniqueness of the film as a work of art separate from the book. From the opening credits, which were spoken and not displayed on the screen, to the ending, in which the exiles who have devoted their lives to memorizing books recite their books while walking blissfully in the snow, Truffaut's genius is there.Also a stroke of genius was the casting of Julie Christie as Monag's drug-addled wife, and as the more compassionate and interested Clarisse, who seduces him into reading and thinking.Like Brave New World, a book by Aldous Huxley, Fahrenheit 451 describes a hedonist world, where the people need not think.If you like Fahrenheit 451, you might also like the 1956 animated film version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, now available on DVD.
12 out of 15 people found the following review useful: The Beauty of Books, 13 April 2006 Author: nycritic
A world without books, controlled by a totalitarian regime that wants you to get education from what They consider to be permissible. Could this happen? Of course it could; it's happening already at a global scale, as it always has. During the Red Scare for example, our country was immersed in the irrational fear of even knowing someone who sympathized with people who sympathized with Communists and once interrogated, many careers went right down the tubes. In many Latin-American countries, most notably Chile, Venezuela, Cuba, and Dominican Republic, et. al., censorship was the only mode of ruling over a population. Books and songs that were considered "too informative" and quasi-subversive were eliminated, the writer or artist forced to either live in exile or tortured in elaborate schemes to get him or her to 1.) divulge who he or she knew who had leads to the opposition, and 2.) to punish his or her temerity, making an example of what happens to those who transgress against those in power. Germany during the Second World War was known for burning books and unless your name is Mel Gibson, the Holocaust did happen. Until recently, China imposed censorship on certain songs from major pop artists because they were deemed "inappropriate". And on and on it goes.The influence of censorship and a society living under hedonistic ignorance cannot be taken for granted: we're there already, in a subtle form of 1984, the sister story of FAHRENHEIT 451. So much surveillance is imposed on us -- where we go (physically or on the Internet), what television or movies do we see, what music do we listen to, our bank transactions, our purchases, our private conversations, even the question that every employer -- not just governmental -- asks its prospective employee: "Do you or have you ever been affiliated with an organization that has designs to overthrow the American government?" Science fiction has become science fact in more ways than one. Television, once considered a media for education, is certainly that, but more often than not, an object that numbs the mind and taints the spirit with banalities. Programs deemed "too risky" are yanked off the air in lieu of a "more accessible" program. Most recently, former governor Giuliani attacked a painting that depicted the Virgin Mary and was made with elephant dung -- laughable, but a reality. The Government decides, via cute commercials, what prescription drugs and feel-good pills we can use. People have stopped the actual act of writing and e-books are the new thing. We see televised broadcasts of criminals under pursuit and deem this "entertainment". News reports, once reliable, are no more so -- one only has to go back a year to see the CBS scandal. We now have become a nation of extreme (but fake) politeness that enforces an explicit political correctness that hinders actual thoughts even when such thoughts may be offensive.FAHRENHEIT 451 is a film that anyone with conscious thought should see more than once because it exposes all these dark aspects of our own society as seen through a window into the future. The most potent imagery that comes to mind and stays with me is the one of the elderly librarian who has amassed a huge collection of books of all kinds: classics, controversial, historical -- even Mad magazine. Books are information even when they are little more than cute romance novels and easy potboilers, but they exist, thus, they must inform and reflect a person's thoughts. I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't commit the act of self-immolation like she does when confronted with the ultimate betrayal -- that of the people designed to protect her. Seeing her light the match that is allowed to fall on top of a heap of books, seeing her look at Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) in ecstatic triumph and extend her arms outward as the flames engulf her entire body, I can't imagine not going out in any other way. Her battle has ended in victory -- there are things worse than dying, and it's her death that has Guy realize the horror of totalitarianism and turn his back on his own life, even at the risk of becoming a fugitive, as he ultimately does.Truffaut and Bradbury, unlike Orwell, shed a light of hope in FAHRENHEIT 451. It's a stoke of genius and a moment of immense beauty -- the one when Guy, now considered dead by the society he once served, meets up with a society of Book People who have been waiting for his arrival. These are people who do what their prehistoric ancestors did: preserve culture, word, by word, and this ensure the future. At a spiritual level, these are enlightened souls who are under preparation for when the time comes to take over the deadened society Guy has left behind. Seeing them introduce themselves, not with their names but the tomes they have become, is remarkable and reflects the lengths to which Man will go to ensure his own self-preservation. FAHRENHEIT 451 is moving on multiple levels, and the dual role Julie Christie plays (Mildred, Guy's wife, and Clarisse, the woman who is the catalyst for his awakening) is casting genius. We see her, a walking, talking Barbie doll at first, and later as the woman she should have been had she rebelled against the drugs and the hedonism imposed on her. One of Truffaut's finest films, and one of the essentials.
11 out of 15 people found the following review useful: The Books Are Alive, 17 December 2005 Author: Claudio Carvalho from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
In a future totalitarian and oppressive society, where books are forbidden, Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) is a fireman. The mission of firemen in this society with fireproof houses is to burn books at 451o F, the temperature of combustion of paper. Montag is married with Linda (Julie Christie), a futile woman that joins "The Family" through the interactive television. When Montag meets Clarisse (Julie Christie, in a double role), she questions him if he has never read a book, and Montag become curious. He decides to steal and read a book, twisting his view of life.François Truffault is one of my favorite directors, and his unique English-spoken film "Fahrenheit 451" is a masterpiece and one of my favorite movies ever. The first time I saw this movie, I was a teenager and I was very impressed with such clever story about this fascinating oppressive society. The visionary Ray Bradbury frightens the viewers with this dramatic sci-fi, not far from the reality in many parts of the world almost forty years later. The awesome Julie Christie, as usual, and Oskar Werner from "Jules et Jim", have magnificent performances. The optimistic conclusion closes this adaptation with golden-key. My vote is ten.Title (Brazil): It is a shame, but this movie has not been released on video or DVD in Brazil. Many years ago, a cable and a broadcast television presented "Fahrenheit 451", but this masterpiece was forgotten by the Brazilian distributors. The unique alternative for Brazilian movie lovers that speak English is to buy the American DVD.
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