Fahrenheit 451
François Truffaut (1966)
The fire crew prepares for action as you might expect – sliding down a pole into the fire station, piling into a red vehicle with a flashing blue light, and heading on their way. After these opening sequences, the expectedness ends. The crew’s destination is a house where there’s no sign of a fire but which a young man (Jeremy Spenser) leaves hurriedly after taking a phone call. On arrival there, the firemen start searching the place; when one turns on an overhead light, it reveals a book placed in the light’s ceramic bowl. The book – Don Quixote – is the first of many uncovered in the house search, and the crew sets fire to them all. A little later, one of the firemen, Guy Montag (Oskar Werner), is in conversation with Clarisse (Julie Christie), a neighbour and fellow commuter, who asks if it’s true that fire brigades – ‘a long time ago’ – used to put fires out. Montag assures her it’s untrue: he says houses have always been fireproof. Clarisse also asks if Montag ever feels like reading rather than burning the books he finds. ‘Why should I?’ he asks, ‘First, I’m not interested; second, I’ve got better things to do; third, it’s forbidden’. Montag is about to be promoted in the fire service but it soon becomes clear he’s a man ripe for subversion. His change of heart, which saves his soul, drives the plot of Fahrenheit 451.
Adapted from Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, with a screenplay by the director and Jean-Louis Richard, this was François Truffaut’s fifth feature but a new departure for him in several ways. He hadn’t previously shot in colour or overseas (filming took place mostly at Pinewood Studios and on location in southern England). This was Truffaut’s first (and last) film in English – and the first to receive mostly negative reviews (though not the first to fare poorly at the box office). I’d seen Fahrenheit 451 once before, in my teens, and remembered very little other than the famous closing episode (which I may well have seen subsequently in clips). In the context of the Truffaut oeuvre, the film might be considered a bibliophile companion piece to Day for Night (1973) and The Last Metro (1980), predicated as they are on cinema and theatre, respectively, being an absolutely good thing. I was delighted now to find this earlier film more interesting and affecting than either of those others (which were commercial and critical successes) – and something else besides. It’s par for the course to be told that a picture of yesteryear is at least as relevant to our own time as it was to the time when it was made. Fahrenheit 451 really is.
Ray Bradbury’s central conceit feels rooted in the McCarthy-inspired pyromania that was raging when he wrote his novel and, even more, in the still recent Nazi book burnings – the latter association reinforced by some of Truffaut’s casting, and the outfits. Even at the very start, the fire crew doesn’t look the way you’d expect, with, as well as the ‘451’ emblazoned on their black uniforms, headgear suggestive of German storm-trooper helmets. The actors concerned include not just blue-eyed, blonde-haired Oskar Werner but also the emphatically Aryan Anton Diffring, who so often played Nazi officers on screen. These connections are deceptive, though. In the controlled society that Truffaut depicts, the fundamental objection to books, according to those whose job it is to destroy them, isn’t that they’re the products of inimical political points of view. It’s, rather, that they bring about dissatisfaction and disorder. In that early conversation with Clarisse, Montag explains that reading is banned because it makes people ‘unhappy’, that books ‘disturb people … make them anti-social’. Beatty (Cyril Cusack), Montag’s boss in the fire service, later confirms this in more detail as he surveys material for his team’s latest fire:
‘Ah, Robinson Crusoe. The negroes didn’t like that because of his man, Friday. And Nietzsche – ah, Nietzsche. The Jews didn’t like Nietzsche. Now, here’s a book about lung cancer. You see, all the cigarette smokers got into a panic, so for everybody’s peace of mind, we burn it. Ah, now this one must be very profound: The Ethics of Aristotle. Now anybody that read that must believe he’s a cut above anybody that hadn’t. You see, it’s no good, Montag. We’ve all got to be alike. The only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal. So, we must burn the books, Montag.’
Although Beatty’s speech builds to sentiments quite at odds with identity politics, there’s a whiff of cancel-culture censorship in the examples cited here.
The arresting opening credits sequence, in which the names of cast and crew don’t appear but are read out in voiceover, instantly establishes the world of the film – the written word outlawed, communications consequently monopolised by images, as well as the spoken word. The plethora of screens-within-the-screen in what follows is therefore part of the main premise as much as prescient but it’s striking that Montag’s airhead wife, Linda (also Julie Christie, with a different hairdo) is addicted to a television programme not far removed from the reality shows de nos jours. The film’s climax includes a startling demonstration of the fallacy that the camera doesn’t lie. On the run from the authorities, Montag watches a TV broadcast that purports to show him run to earth and shot dead. It can only be described as fake news.
Truffaut’s lack of detail on the workings of this dystopia, including how long it has existed, is presumably intentional but frustrating, even so. As the narrative goes on, Clarisse’s question about what fire crews are rumoured to have done ‘a long time ago’ is increasingly puzzling. When Montag insists that houses have always been fireproof, Clarisse replies, ‘Ours isn’t’ – an early clue as to what its contents may include: she turns out to live with her uncle and their books. Clarisse is a probationary teacher (until she’s informed her services are no longer required); the film is sketchy, too, on what school education now comprises. At the start, we hear children’s voices reciting multiplication tables but you could have heard the same in a real English primary school in the 1960s (except that, unless I misheard, some of the arithmetic chanted here is wrong …).
While an older woman (Bee Duffell) who chooses to self-immolate along with her large library rather than live without it makes sense as the representative of an older generation raised on and devoted to books, Montag is harder to understand. At first, it’s out of curiosity that he starts saving odd volumes from the flames and smuggling them into his own home. We seem meant to think that books are a new discovery for him although as soon as he starts to read them aloud to himself, he does so fluently. With his conversion underway, he interrupts Linda and the female friends she’s invited round to their house (the gathering, oddly enough, brings to mind a present-day book group) by reading to them from David Copperfield. This moves one of the women (Ann Bell) to tears but Linda and the others are decidedly displeased. The lack of immediate repercussions to this incident – mightn’t one of his wife’s guests report him to the authorities? – points up another bothering aspect of the plot. It takes a surprisingly long time, given Montag’s changed behaviour at work, for beady-eyed Captain Beatty and Montag’s other colleagues to work out that he has turned non-conformist.
A book of Dali plates on a bonfire-in-the-making, although understandable in the sense that these might be deemed subversive, does raise the unanswered question of which images are and are not considered acceptable. All the other books chucked from their shelves surely serve Truffaut’s purpose: each time one hits the deck you peer at the screen to see what the book is and resent its impending destruction. (This viewer felt this way even about a book of crossword puzzles. We have it easier now, of course: this kind of paperback goes in the recycling once the crosswords are done.) There’s the occasional in-joke – flames lap at a Cahiers du Cinéma volume – but the accumulating sacrifices are emotionally effective, making you feel more and more how precious books are. This is so different from Day for Night and The Last Metro, where you just can’t accept the intrinsic value of movies and plays on the strength of the crummy examples of them that dominate proceedings.
Things that are usually defects – the post-recorded sound, some stilted delivery of lines – work well in Fahrenheit 451. They reinforce the alien quality of the society Truffaut describes, as does Nicolas Roeg’s fine cinematography. It may be a happy accident but the ill-assorted acting styles are similarly effective. While some of the playing in minor parts seems standard-issue sci-fi woodenness, Oskar Werner, in the central role, is thoroughly naturalistic and so comes across as the embodiment of a fuller humanity. The double casting of Julie Christie, which received particular criticism on the film’s original release, works well, too. Christie, at least at this stage of her career, often struggled to make the words she spoke convincing: they tended to sound like an actress’s lines rather her character’s utterances. At the same time, you could hear in her voice that Christie was trying to feel the lines as strongly as her face was able to express her character’s thoughts and moods. She thus contributes, especially as Clarisse, to both the unnatural and the human aspects of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut’s use of the innately humorous and eccentric Cyril Cusack to epitomise the mindset of a totalitarian regime is a stroke of genius. With Cusack in the role, it’s grimly funny when Beatty, patrolling a public playground, sees a baby in a pushchair, leans in for a closer look and removes a miniature book tucked into the infant’s romper suit. Beatty’s excoriation of books, quoted above, has added impact because Cusack conveys the man’s real irritation with authors: even worse than novelists are ‘thinkers, philosophers, all of them saying exactly the same thing: “Only I am right. The others are all idiots”.’ Ann Bell is affecting in her couple of minutes on the screen. She’s one of numerous uncredited cast members. Another is Mark Lester (as a schoolboy) who, only a couple of years later, would be the title character in Oliver!
The film’s conclusion, which sees Montag flee beyond the city to join Clarisse and other escapees in rural isolation, is both amusing and moving. The community of ‘book people’ comprises individuals all of whom have memorised the entire text of a book and thus become that book. They’ve thus been able to dispose of the books as such; as a result, ‘The law can’t touch them’. Those to whom Montag is introduced, by a man (Alex Scott) identifying himself as Stendhal’s The Life of Henri Brulard, include, among others, twin brothers (Frank and Fred Cox), each of them half of Pride and Prejudice, Machiavelli’s The Prince (Michael Balfour) and Plato’s Dialogues (Judith Dynan). In a nod to the film’s inspiration, another book person (Denis Gilmore) is Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. The Weir of Hermiston (John Rae) is dying but has been passing on the words of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel to his young nephew: the boy (Earl Younger, beautifully directed by Truffaut) is diligently learning the words by heart so as to take over his uncle’s identity. Montag chooses to become Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. In its thriller mode, Bernard Herrmann’s score recalls ones he wrote for Hitchcock pictures to rather distracting effect. His music for Truffaut also includes a romantic element, though. In this closing section, as the book people walk about a snowy landscape, reciting themselves to themselves, Herrmann’s score comes into its own.
13 February 2022