Fahrenheit 451
(film)
Fahrenheit 451 is a 1966 film of a dystopian future, based on the novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury.
According to Bradbury the novel is not about censorship, but is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature. The central character, Guy Montag, is employed as a "fireman" (which, in this case, means "book burner"). 451 degrees Fahrenheit (about 233°C) is stated as "the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns ...". It was directed by François Truffaut, his only English-language film.
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's dystopian soft science fiction novel, was published in 1953. It first appeared as the novella, The Fireman, in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society, written in the early years of the Cold War.
Fahrenheit 451 takes place in an unspecified future time in a hedonistic and rabidly anti-intellectual America that has completely abandoned self-control and bans the reading of books, with the penalty of owning them is, at the minimum, confinement in a mental hospital and having the books burnt, and, at the maximum, sentence to immediate death. People are now only entertained by in-ear radio and an interactive form of television. The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman, certain that his job—burning books, and the houses that hold them, and persecuting those who own them—is the right thing to do.
The movie differed somewhat from the novel. For example, Clarisse survives throughout the film and accompanies Montag when he leaves the city, and the role played by Faber is reduced significantly, appearing only briefly in one scene as an old man asleep on a park bench. Bradbury has said that Truffaut "captured the soul and essence of the book," although he disliked the double omission of Faber and the Mechanical Hound.
The film starred Oskar Werner as Montag and Julie Christie in the dual roles of Linda (Mildred) Montag and Clarisse.
Note: According to the book Bradbury: An Illustrated Life, neither Bradbury nor Truffaut chose the books that appear in the movie. The DVD commentary suggests that many or all of the books used came from Truffaut's personal library. One of the books, though barely visible, is Fahrenheit 451 itself.
List of works and authors mentioned
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through
the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Arthur
Schopenhauer
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Don Quixote by Miguel
de Cervantes
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Leo Tolstoy
Lolita by Vladimir
Nabokov
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Metaphysics
by Aristotle
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Nadia
Othello by William
Shakespeare
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (volumes 1 and 2)
Republic
by Plato
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Catcher
in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Corsair by George Byron
The Good Life
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Pickwick Papers by Charles
Dickens
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Walt Whitman
William Faulkner
Wuthering
Heights by Emily Brontë
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
A History
of Science & Technology
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
A
Year of Grace
Argos
Baby Doll
Cahiers du Cinéma
Christopher
Landon
Confessions of an Irish Rebel by Brendan Behan
Death of a Dream
Death of a Ghost by Margaret Allingham
Death on Milestone Buttress by
Glyn Carr
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Deux Anglaises et le Continent
Dom Juan by Molière
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Gargantua
and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
Gasparo Hauser (This is the book
Montag takes in the film, as opposed to the Bible in the novel)
Geheimnisse
der Fürstin von Cadignan by Honoré de Balzac
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
Holy Deadlock by A. P. Herbert
In ze pocket by Walter
S. Tevis
Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
Interglossa
by Lancelot Hogben
Jazz
Jean Cocteau
Jeanne D'Arc by Joseph Delter
Journal of André Bulat
Journey into Space by Charles Chilton
Justine
by Marquis de Sade
Le Avventure di Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Le Monde
à Côté by Gyp
Les Nègres by Jean Genet
Lewis
et Irène by Paul Morand
Look With Mother ABC Book
Marcel Proust
Marie Dubois by Jacques Audiberti
Memoirs of Saint Simon by Louis de Rouvroy
Metallurgy for Engineers
My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin
My Life
and Loves by Frank Harris
My Life in Art by Constantin Stanislavski
Nest
of Vipers by Tod Claymore
New Writing
Ninety Years Wiser
No Orchids
for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase
Or Be the Deed
Our Nuclear Future
La Peau de Chagrin by Honoré de Balzac
Petrouchka by Igor Stravinsky
Plexus by Henry Miller
Raffles and Miss Blandish by George Orwell
Reappraisals
of History
Rebus by Paul Gegauff
Roberte ce soir by Pierre Klossowski
Sanctuary
Sermons and Soda-Water by John O'Hara
She Might Have Been
Queen by Geoffrey Bocca
Social Aspects of Disease by A. Leslie Banks
Spanish
Crossword Puzzle Book
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Sweet Danger by Margaret
Allingham
Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
The Bodley
Head
The Castle on the Hill by Elizabeth Goudge
The Defeat of the Spanish
Armada by Garrett Mattingly
The Ethics by Aristotle
The Evil of the Day
by Thomas Sterling
The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy
The Good Soldier Schweik
by Jaroslav Hašek
The Happy Prisoner by Monica Dickens
The History
of Torture
The House of the Arrow by A. E. W. Mason
The Jason Murders
by John Newton Chance
The Jewish Question by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Moon
& Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
The Mystery of Jack the Ripper by Leonard
Matters
The Owls' House by Crosbie Garstin
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Prince by Niccolò
Machiavelli
The Sittaford Mystery
The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet
The
Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
"The Walrus and the Carpenter"
by Lewis Carroll
The Weather by George Kimble & Raymond Bush
The White
Friday Murders
The White Priory Murders
The World of Salvador Dali by
Robert Descharnes
Their London Cousins by Lydia Miller Middleton
Vanity
Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Weir
of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson
We're Still Using That Greasy MAD Stuff
(a MAD Magazine compilation book of material from issues of the magazine)
Wreck
of the Running Gate
Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau
The
film was shot at Pinewood Studios in England, with the monorail exterior scene
taken at the French SAFEGE test track, in Châteneuf-sur-Loire near Orléans,
France (since dismantled). The Alton housing estate in Roehampton, South London
was also featured in the film.
Truffaut spoke virtually no English, but co-wrote
the screenplay with Jean-Louis Ricard. Truffaut expressed disappointment with
the often stilted and unnatural English-language dialogue. He was much happier
with the version which was dubbed into French.
The production work was done
in French.
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