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 inoffensive classics such as Jane Eyre is among them.) They "preserve"
these books by each of them memorizing 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 memorize.
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 . . .
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.
Voted
# 85
of the
Top 100 Sci-Fi
Movies
of all time
by:
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.) —
