Out of Nothinkness

Fahrenheit 451. The Red Beast roars as it leaps into the sunlight. Thirty feet Tom nose to tail and wrapped in scarlet p1ates of steel, it hurtles down the highway at 100 m.p.h. Outside a new apartment house, it screams to a rubber-ripping stop and flings nine tiny men in tight black uniforms off its big red back. The men crash into a flat, turn drawers and closets inside out, carry off a heap of hidden books, whip out a handsome copper flamethrower, burn all the books to fine grey soot.

The Red Beast and its hellish brood are the principal constituents of Fahrenheit 451, a number that both denotes the flash point of paper and identifies one of the innumerable book-burning brigades set up after World War III by a dictatorship determined to put out the fire of freedom in the human heart. Assembled first in that overproductive fiend factory, the fantascientific brain of Author Ray Bradbury, the brigade has now been refurbished by France's Francois Truffaut in a weirdly gay little picture that assails with both horror and humor all forms of tyranny over the mind of man.

Truffaut's hero (Oskar Werner) is a member of the brigade, a pyromanic punk who sincerely believes that "books are just rubbish" and should be burned. After a hard day at the cultural crematorium, he cools off with tranquilizers, sits staring at the wall screen with his trank-tanked wife (Julie Christie), and sinks slowly into nothinkness. One day, riding home on the monorail, he meets a girl (Julie Christie) who looks like his wife but has something more exciting on her mind. "Have you ever read the books you burn?" she asks him slyly. He hasn't, but the idea really grabs him. Overnight, the firebug is transformed into a bookworm. Horrified, the hero's wife betrays him to the thought police; but before they can close in, he runs off to join a literary maquis composed of men and women who spend their lives strolling through a birch forest and memorizing books against the day when freedom is reborn and they will be privileged to serve as the world's first "living library."

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.

The 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.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.