Memorable, crazy movie

How sad is this?

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

And explained he wrote this story about the time televisions were taking over homes!! He hated this and tried to imagine life without books!!! A good idea can come from anywhere! I liked this version and did not like the recent remake. Cheers!

Although Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1951, the film produced in 1966 is as fresh as if Truffaut created today. François Truffaut is a master director and followed the many wonderful camera angles by Alfred Hitchcock. This is a serious dystrophic world and will grab you from the opening credits. I cannot recommend this film more highly. The film sends a ominous message to those that want everyone to think the same, a very relevant topic for today.

Fantasist Ray Bradbury wrote FAHRENHEIT 451 about new technology rolling in at the time (1953). His theme was originally a critique of the new media, including television--a medium where, too often, then thinking is done for the viewer. Whereas, with books, effort is involved just in hefting it up and opening the cover; and thinking is involved in reading and comprehending.Unfortunately, even by the time the movie came out nearly ten years later and certainly since, pedagogues had taught young readers it was about censorship. The misunderstanding was so serious, once when Bradbury gave a talk at the college and said his book was a media critique, the students protested that HE was wrong.Try watching this movie (if reading a book is too much trouble) with Bradbury's original theme in mind, and think about society half a century later, where books are often considered passe and we're surrounded not only by an exhausting variety of choices on television; where we can read books online or on downloads; and where we are drowning in Internet social media.As for the movie, Julie Christie is always welcome, as is the underutilized Oscar Werner. Personally, I'm no fan of Truffaut and wish someone else directed the thing. However, I like the hopeful ending. The images of book-burning seem geared more to the alternate/censorship application of the story, but that's a failure on the part of the filmmakers to foresee a time when computers would dominate the reading landscape.Compare the book-burning images to the scene in Pal's TIME MACHINE where the time traveler finds the Eloi have plenty of books--but when he picks one up it crumbles to dust because no one has touched it or bothered to preserve what's in it. That brings you closer to Bradbury's vision.

For me the best science fiction films don't have to be multi-million dollar blockbusters featuring other worlds, spacecraft or aliens. My personal taste is for recognisably near-future films or TV series where it's easier to imagine yourself in the action and think that, yes, this is just possible in your own lifetime. Especially with older films, it's often interesting to see how accurate the writer or director's future predictions are. "1984" of course stands as the template for this dystopian future depiction but this fine Truffaut film of the Ray Bradbury book also put me in mind of its near-contemporary small-screen counterpart "The Prisoner".Of course the invention of Kindle-like reading tablets renders the premise of "Fahrenheit 451" somewhat useless, but there were several other recognisable motifs in the film which have reverberated down into today, like interactive TV show participation, the ever-present debate on state censorship and the dumbing-down of society.Stylishly directed by Francois Truffaut and superbly shot by the emergent Nicolas Roeg, it's a strikingly visual film, with Roeg's trademark use of the colour red evident everywhere. Red of course is also the colour of fire which is used to destroy the books discovered by the state-run "fire-brigades" sent out on informant tip-offs, one of whose crew, the rigorous, seemingly ambitious Oskar Werner, is the central character whose conversion (or reversion) to an appreciation of literature is the fulcrum of the film.His young wife, played by Julie Christie is deliberately based upon Dickens' child-like Dora in "David Copperfield", the book that turns Werner's character and in an imaginative twist, she also plays the "girl on the train" who seeks him out as a possible convert to the book-people cause. I understand the criticisms of the acting in the film, particularly by the leads as vacant, wooden and stilted but I can allow this given that they are representing almost automatons in the way they live ordered lives, are fed on comic-like "fake-newspapers", state-propaganda TV shows and travelling to work lemming-like in efficient sky-trains.I'm a great book-lover myself, so I lapped up the premise of the importance of literature in our lives but Truffaut never forgets he's making a thriller too. I particularly liked the idea of people becoming living repositories of banned books, although quite how they memorise whole books is one of the harder-to-believe aspects of the story. The ending was suitably enigmatic and reminded me of a similar trick Truffaut's hero Hitchcock employed to likewise striking effect in "The Birds" but there were many other memorable scenes which linger long in the memory in this fine, underrated feature with a now deservedly growing reputation as a genre classic.