Word: truffauts
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FAHRENHEIT 451. Ray Bradbury's somber tale of a futuristic society where reading is forbidden has been refurbished by France's François Truffaut (Jules and Jim) into a strangely humorous, coolly competent little film that stars Oskar Werner as a book-burning fireman and Julie Christie as both of the women in his life...
FAHRENHEIT 451. In adapting Fantasticist Ray Bradbury's tale of a society where reading is against the law, French Director Francois Truffaut has created a weirdly gay film that makes up in entertainment what it lacks in relevance. Truffaut's hero is a book-burning fireman (Oskar Werner) whose job is to start fires rather than put them out. Julie Christie plays a dual role as his TV-addicted mate and the book-loving girl who changes his life...
Fahrenheit 451 may not prove to be the flash point of the average moviegoer, but it should work up a gentle glow among the many admirers of Director Truffaut. Filming for the first time in English, he loses nothing but one elegant Gallic pun-in the original scenario the French words for "book men" and "free men" are combined in a portmanteau phrase: les hommes-livres. Filming for the first time in color, he employs it with admirable tact to contrast God's green world with man's grey life...
...Truffaut is also careful to contrast a real character with his unreal situation. Werner is unshakably believable as a little man who gets hold of a much too big idea, a Jacob who snatches at a straw and finds himself wrestling an angel. As for Christie, the picture strongly supports the widely held suspicion that this actress cannot actually act. Though she plays two women of diametrically divergent dispositions, they seem in her portrayal to differ only in their hairdos. But maybe Truffaut is partly to blame...
...real trouble with the picture, though, is that Truffaut might better have made another. The somewhat remote theme challenged his technical competence more than his heart; the finished film displays the artisan more than the artist. Truffaut is France's most consistently exciting moviemaker, but in his recent pictures he has seemed to be more interested in the movies than he is in life...