FAHRENHEIT 451

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STARRING: Oskar Werner, Julie Christie, Cyril Cusack, Anton Diffring, Jeremy Spenser, Bee Duffell

1966, 113 Minutes, Directed by: Francois Truffaut

Description: The futuristic society depicted in Fahrenheit 451 is a culture without books. Firemen still race around in red trucks and wear helmets, but their job is to start fires: they ferret out forbidden stashes of books, douse them with gasoline, and make public bonfires. A fireman named Montag's exposure to David Copperfield wakens an instinct toward reading and individual thought. (That's why books are banned--they give people too many ideas.) — Amazon.com

Based on the Ray Bradbury novel of the same name set in a dystopian future in which it is the fire brigade's job to burn banned books.

One of the firemen rebels and flees to the forests where he joins a group of dissidents whose set task it is to preserve these banned books. (They seem to include almost all books since a list of unoffensive classics such as Jane Eyre is among them.) They "preserve" these books by each of them memorising the complete text of a particular book. In fact, they become that specific book as they forget their real names and is instead called Moby Dick, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment . . . the book they have been assigned to memorise.

Weird, yes. And wonderful. Everything science fiction is on about. Thus it should come as no surprise that this film was made in the 1960s by a French director (Francois Traffaut). Hollywood just seems to lack the intellectual capacity and moral integrity to make films like these . . .
 

• Read an extended review of Fahrenheit 451.

Sci-Fi Movie Page Pick: French art house movie - but without the subtitles. See this movie based on the novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury about "firemen" who burns in a future dystopia before Hollywood makes the remake it has been threatening us with lately.
 

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