By the mid-60's the sci-fi movie was beginning to undergo a change as they now broke away from the 1950's stereotypes and filmmakers began to do eye popping stories. One of those was the adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. Released in the fall of 1966 and set in the future the film starts out with Montag(Oskar Werner)
a fireman who burns books and his boss is Faber (Cyril Cusack).
He is married to Linda (Julie Christie; Montag's wife name in the book was Mildred) who is a playwright.
And while he goes to work he catches up with Clarisse (Julie Christie again) who is his informer. She wants to know why he burns books and she asks Montag if he could stop for a moment and think about the evils that book burning does to society. Just like that Montag starts taking interest for reading books and takes one book and reads it at night. He feels relaxed. But when Linda sees that her husband is reading she is outraged and in the process, Montag becomes a wanted man (yet another hint about the practice of nonconformity).
The movie was directed and co-written by famed French director Francois Truffant-who made his first movie for an American studio (Universal) but this would be his only movie in English because Truffant was working with two scripts-one in English and one in French. The director also re-teamed with Werner five years after the success of Jules and Jim and ironically enough tension built between the two. The amazing thing about this movie is how Julie Christie looks with her two characters. No question that her appearance as Linda was inspired by model Jean Shrimpton (long hair)
and her appearance of Clarisse was based on Twiggy (short hair and gawky looking).
The visuals looks great while Bernard Hermann does the music score (it was his first after being fired by director Alfred Hitchcock) and he would collaborate with Truffant two more times and what is amazing is that by the time he would film this movie Truffant had just done writing an interview book with Hitchcock!
Fahrenheit 451 marked the first time the opening credits was done by a narrator. Ray Bradbury admitted that the one thing that he noticed that wasn't in the movie was the "Mechanical Hound" or a robot dog. I liked how it ends with Montag and Clarisse being exiled to the park and be with the "Book People" in which they speak the words of a book that they know. Above all this movie is excellent.
From YouTube is a scene early on in which Linda talks with one of the performers while on a "Video Wall" which is now what we called "High Definition TV".
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