The protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a “fireman” tasked with incinerating what few books remain in a domestic-screen-dominated future society forced into illiteracy. Late in life, Ray Bradbury declared that he wrote the novel because he was “worried about people being turned into morons by TV.” This tinges with a certain irony given that the latest adaptation was made for HBO (2018). That project, which one critic likened it to “a GlaxoSmithKline production of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” will probably not be the last Fahrenheit 451 movie. Nor was it the first: that title goes to the one Nouvelle Vague auteur François Truffaut’s film directed in 1966, though many count that as a dubious honor.
A contemporary review in Time magazine memorably called Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 a “weirdly gay little picture that assails with both horror and humor all forms of tyranny over the mind of man,” albeit one that “strongly supports the widely held suspicion that Julie Christie cannot actually act.”
Truffaut boldly cast Christie in a dual role, as both protagonist Guy Montag’s TV-and-pill-addicted wife and the young rebel who eventually lures him over to the pro-book liberation movement. Though some viewers see it as the picture’s fatal flaw, Scott Tobias, writing at The Dissolve, calls it a “masterstroke” that renders the nearly identical characters “the abstract representatives of conformity and non-conformity they had always been in the book.”
It’s easy to imagine what appeal the source material would have held for Truffaut, the most literary-minded leader of the French New Wave; recall the shrine to Balzac kept by young Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s autobiographical debut The 400 Blows. By the time he went to work on Fahrenheit 451, his sixth feature, he’d become what the American behind-the-scenes trailer calls an “internationally famous French director.” But this time, circumstances conspired against him: his increasingly fractious relationship with Jules and Jim star Oskar Werner did the latter’s performance as Montag no favors, and the money having come from the U.K. forced him to work in English, a language of which he had scant command at the time.
Truffaut himself enumerates these and other difficulties in a production diary published over several issues of Cahiers du Cinéma (beginning with number 175). Yet nearly six decades later, his troubled interpretation of Fahrenheit 451 still fascinates. New Yorker critic Richard Brody calls it “one of Truffaut’s wildest films, a coldly flamboyant outpouring of visual invention in the service of literary passion and artistic memory as well as a repudiation of a world of uniform convenience and comfortable conformity.” Today we may wonder why the parasocial relationship Montag’s wife anxiously maintains with her television, which must have seemed fantastical in the mid-sixties, feels discomfitingly familiar — and how long it will be before Fahrenheit 451 gets re-adapted as a binge-ready prestige TV drama.
Related content:
How Truffaut Became Truffaut: From Petty Thief to Great Auteur
Behold Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories
Why Should We Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451? A New TED-Ed Animation Explains
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Nice little article. Just one mistake in paragraph 3: “Ray Montag”??? Should be “Guy Montag”, of course.
Oh, and Truffaut didn’t just have a poor grasp of English in 1966. He had a lifelong struggle with it. Fortunately, both Julie Christie and cinematographer Nic Roeg were fluent French speakers, which made his time on set a little bit easier. (And Ray Bradbury’s wife was a teacher of French, so was able to translate Truffaut’s letters to Bradbury!)