The Illustrated Author: Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury is a very difficult guy to dramatize, because that which reads so beautifully on the printed page doesn’t fit in the mouth - it fits in the head. And you find characters saying the things that Bradbury’s saying and you say, "Wait a minute, people don’t say that."
Rod Serling

The astounding tales of Ray Bradbury, who died at the age of 91 after a long illness on June 5, 2012, inevitably inspired several television programs, motion pictures and short films. Despite good, sometimes noble intentions, filmmakers, for the most part, just can’t seem to get Bradbury right, confronted by the difficulty of translating stories so rich in the lyricism of the written word into a medium so dependent on the stimulation of the eye.

The first attempt to give Ray Bradbury’s fiction a long-deserved, feature-length, literate interpretation came not from Hollywood but from a filmmaker renowned as one of the founders of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Francois Truffaut, who left an indelible impression on international cinema with such avant garde classics as "The 400 Blows," "Shoot the Piano Player" and "Jules and Jim," remains most recognizable to American audiences for his rare onscreen role as the French scientist Lacombe in 1977’s "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." "Fahrenheit 451" (1966) was Truffaut’s first motion picture in color and his only English-language production.

In interviews before his death, Ray Bradbury would inevitably express his gratitude to Hugh Hefner for initially serializing Fahrenheit 451 in three issues of Playboy magazine before it was published as his first novel (although it was published in book form earlier, The Martian Chronicles is an anthology of common-themed short stories).

Director Otto Preminger had originally approached Bradbury for the screen rights to Fahrenheit 451, but the author later admitted, "I was very afraid of him. He was very Germanic and very demanding." Bradbury recognized similarities between Preminger and John Huston, the autocratic director with whom the writer had collaborated on the screenplay for "Moby Dick" (1956). According to Bradbury, Huston was "difficult enough. He almost ruined my psyche." In Bradbury’s eyes, "Truffaut was a much more gentler human being. There’s a chance of doing it right."

Fahrenheit 451 presents a dystopian future when free thinking is suppressed by the banning of anything in writing, and firemen, once the proud extinguishers of flames, are now responsible for burning confiscated books. (Bradbury’s unscientific research for the title resulted in a fire marshal telling him that book paper catches fire at 451 degrees.) The story, and, as particularly envisioned in the film by Truffaut, whose screen characters, according to one writer, share a "perpetual fear of loneliness," depicts the transformation of a fireman named Montag on a journey, according to the editors of The Overlook Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, "not from reading to revolution, but from isolation to a sense of belonging."

Well-known French actors Charles Aznavour and Jean-Paul Belmondo were considered for the role of Montag before Terence Stamp, whose film debut in "Billy Budd" (1962) earned him a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination, was cast. Julie Christie, who had recently won an Academy Award for her role in "Darling" and portrayed Lara Antipova in "Doctor Zhivago," was cast in dual roles as Montag’s vapid wife, addicted to sleeping pills and the household wall-sized television, and as a rebellious schoolteacher who belongs to the "Book People," a secret society that commits books to memory and keeps alive the spirit of free thought. ("Even though this totalitarian government is destroying the books…there are people who love the written word," George Slusser, curator emeritus of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Utopia at UC Riverside noted.  "That is true in most of [Bradbury’s] stories.")

Julie Christie as
Linda Montag

Julie Christie as Clarisse,
the schoolteacher

At the time, Stamp and Christie were often spotted as a couple in the Mod London of the swinging ‘60s (below), but Stamp withdrew from "Fahrenheit 451" over worries that Christie, in her dual role, would overshadow his performance. (Stamp and Christie eventually starred together in 1967’s "Far from the Madding Crowd.")

Terence Stamp, incidentally, survived the swinging ‘60s and remains an active, sought-after actor, with recent roles in "Wanted," "Valkyrie" and "The Adjustment Bureau." Likewise, Julie Christie followed an acclaimed performance of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s in 2006’s "Away from Her" with an appearance as the Grandmother in 2011’s "Red Riding Hood."

Julie Christie at the premiere of "Red Riding Hood"

Paul Newman, Peter O’Toole and Montgomery Clift were subsequently considered for the part of Montag, which ultimately went to Austrian-born Oskar Werner, who had starred alongside Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s most popular film, "Jules and Jim." The sad-eyed actor with a languid, mesmerizing delivery seemed the ideal choice to portray the lonely, soul-searching fireman (below).

Oskar Werner had made his Hollywood debut in 1951 in the World War II espionage thriller "Decision Before Dawn," playing a German POW recruited as a spy for the Allies who sacrifices his life to enable an American officer to avoid enemy troops. This led to a series of film roles casting the actor in a tragic light. In "Ship of Fools" (1965), he portrayed an ill-fated doctor; in "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1965), he was a Jewish spy executed in East Germany; in "The Shoes of the Fisherman" (1968), he played a terminally ill Jesuit priest suspected of heresy; in his last screen appearance, he portrayed Faye Dunaway’s Jewish husband in the appropriately titled "Voyage of the Damned" (1976).

The Oskar Werner who showed up on Truffaut’s set for "Fahrenheit 451" was not the same actor who had gotten along so famously with  the director during the exhilarating production of "Jules and Jim." The actor had received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor for "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" and an Oscar nomination as Best Actor in "Ship of Fools." His role in the latter resulted in a flood of adoring fan mail, and he now apparently saw himself as a Hollywood star making a film with a French director. Much to Truffaut’s chagrin, Werner strode into the film with his own suggestions for Julie Christie’s performance.

In one of the film's cleverer images, Montag enjoys the wordless Sunday comics of the future.

In a popular, published diary, Truffaut recalled "Fahrenheit 451" as his "saddest and most difficult" filmmaking experience, the unhappiest chapter in his career, all due to increasingly intense conflicts between the director and the star. During the final two weeks of production, the relationship had deteriorated to the point of neither speaking to each other. Producer Lewis M. Allen conveyed Truffaut’s directions to Werner. Truffaut would rely on photographing doubles for Werner in long shots, and for an inserted close-up of Werner’s hand, the director purposely selected a crew member with the worst nicotine-stained fingers. For his part, Werner, just before the film’s final scene was to be shot, got a haircut to intentionally throw off the continuity.

Francois Truffaut and Julie Christie share a moment of tranquility on the set.

Alcoholism would be a deciding factor in the decline of both the career and health of Oskar Werner, who grew reclusive in his last years before his death from a heart attack in 1984 at the age of 61. Francois Truffaut had succumbed to a brain tumor two days earlier, age 52.

The supporting cast of "Fahrenheit 451" includes a sympathetic performance by Cyril Cusack (above center), a venerable South African-born Irish actor (no relation to actor siblings John and Joan Cusack), as the fire station captain and surrogate father for Montag. Among those originally considered for the role were Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and Sterling Hayden.

Playing a jealous and conniving rival fireman is Anton Diffring, a recognizable character actor whose blonde hair, blue eyes and chiseled, hawk-like features ensured him a series of roles as German officers in films such as "The Heroes of Telemark," "The Blue Max" and "Where Eagles Dare."

Diffring was openly gay, and we are pretty sure that it was something of an inside joke when, in a fleeting closeup in "Fahrenheit 451," Diffring, in obvious drag as the schoolteacher’s headmistress, peers through a classroom window.

Irish actress Bee Duffell provides the film with one of its most enduring images as the Book Woman who willingly immolates herself in the midst of her treasured library, succumbing to the smoke and flames with a rapturous smile worthy of Joan of Arc.

Monty Python fans will recognize Bee Duffell, in her last screen role, as the Old Crone threatened by King Arthur in his search for shrubbery for the Knights Who Say Ni in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Mention should also be made of British actor Alex Scott, not so much for his appearance at film’s end as the benevolent leader of the exiled Book People (above) but for his vocal contribution at film’s beginning. There are no opening titles, only Scott dryly intoning the credits as the camera zooms in on one rooftop TV antenna after another, accompanied by the music of the incomparable Bernard Herrmann. (The movie’s sole printed title is "The End.")

Bernard Herrmann will forever be associated with his unforgettable scores for a number of films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, namely "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "The Wrong Man," "The Trouble with Harry," "Vertigo," "Psycho," "North by Northwest" and "Marnie." Herrmann was at a low point in his career after he and Hitchcock had a falling out over the score for "Torn Curtain" when Truffaut approached him to compose the music for "Fahrenheit 451."

Herrmann utilized strings, two harps, vibraphone, xylophone and glockenspiel to create a haunting score which alternately provides a lush romantic counterpoint to the cold aloofness of the future and a forceful, almost neurotic urgency to the relentless oppression of the firemen. Allegedly, the music score directly influenced producer George Martin’s string arrangement for The Beatles’ hit single "Eleanor Rigby"

Francois Truffaut was, in fact, in the midst of interviewing Alfred Hitchcock for an upcoming book, and beyond the deliberate hiring of Hitchcock’s favorite composer, "Fahrenheit 451" features a number of direct "quotes" from Hitchcock’s films. Although Truffaut would have preferred to shoot the film in black-and-white, he relied on cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (who would become an acclaimed director himself with such features as "Don’t Look Now" and "The Man Who Fell to Earth") to push some of the colors to the extreme, particularly vibrant reds reminiscent of cinematographer Robert Burks’ work on Hitchcock’s "Vertigo" and "Marnie."

Truffaut on the set

"Fahrenheit 451" is a film you either love or hate. Undeniably, it has often been cited as Truffaut’s worst film. Among the several negative reviewers at the time, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times complained, "If Francois Truffaut were trying to make literature seem dull and the whole hideous practice of book-burning seem no more shocking than putting a blow-torch to a pile of leaves, he could not have accomplished his purpose much better than he unintentionally has in…‘Fahrenheit 451.’ Holy smoke! What a pretentious and pedantic production he has made of Ray Bradbury’s story…And, furthermore, what a dismal fellow Oskar Werner manages to make this solemnly regimented fireman who finally becomes a fire-department dropout…" According to Crowther, "It makes for pretty dreary entertainment when you have to sit there and watch a frozen-faced Mr. Werner piously turn away from a long-haired, voluptuous Julie Christie and go marching off down the railway tracks in quest of the bleak, bobbed-haired Miss Christie…"

On the other hand, the future has been kind to the movie. "The film gets better every year," Ray Bradbury commented in 2003. As films improve technologically, he said, "You come out aching and you’re hungry. You haven’t seen anything. With Truffaut, you’ve seen something."

Especially poignant is the concluding sequence, as the Book People pass each other in a marvelously timed snowfall, lovingly reciting aloud the stories they have memorized, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s enchanting music. "The ending of the film is one of the most beautiful endings on any film ever," Bradbury noted. "If you have a medium film and end it beautifully, you have a beautiful film."