Fahrenheit 451

In Brief: François Truffaut stepped significantly outside his comfort zone when he undertook this adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic dystopian novel in 1966. It was Truffaut's first film shot in color and in a studio, first English language film and first shot outside of his native France. It was also the first of the Nouvelle Vague auteur's films to meet with critical derision, having been famously panned on its release by Pauline Kael. While I don't quite share Ms. Kael's sense of entitled disappointment in Truffaut, or even the filmmaker's own disdain for the film, I will say that it's possibly his most uneven work and certainly could have been better. Still, it's an interesting film if only for the novelty of watching Truffaut attempt to make something at once commercial and transgressive, yet falling short of the mark on both counts. Perhaps he intended to make some sort of subtextual statement by directing a film about the importance of books that's so clearly inferior to the book on which it's based. Whatever the motivation behind the film or the reasons for its self-evident deficiencies, bad Truffaut's still better than what passes for good from most filmmakers, and Fahrenheit 451 is no exception.