Rating: 
Summary: Great film about a bleak future
Review: This review is for those (like me) who haven't read the book. There, now we can talk about just the movie. Oskar Werner stars as Montag, an unhappy man living in a monotonous futuristic society. Books are illegal, Big Brother-style screens are on every wall, emotions are out, and people take drugs to endure their bleak lives. Montag is a fireman whose job it is to find hidden books, burn them, and arrest the owners. One day he becomes curious about these books and sneaks a copy of David Copperfield home. His spaced-out wife (Julie Christie) turns him in to the authorities and he must run for his life. He runs to a free-thinker (also played by Christie) who is a book-lover.Oskar Werner is wonderful as the sensitive, confused fireman who longs to really connect with people, ideas, and feelings. Christie shines in two very different roles: the glamorous but bored housewife and the brave ex-teacher who dares to read books. The music contributes to the intense and dangerous mood of this film. Its view of the future is frightening and sad, where paranoia the norm; but the ending is quite hopeful and touching. I recommend this movie to those who have not read the book; you are free to enjoy it without comparing it to the novel. The script, actors, and direction are all excellent.
Rating: 
Summary: Fahrenheit 451: Fire As Metaphor
Review: No one ever said that Hollywood was morally required to maintain the vision, the ethos, the scope of the book from which the movie was made. The jump from paper to screen is too vast to permit more than a taste of the original. With Fahrenheit 451, Francois Truffaut capably manages to maintain the balancing act of the increasing inner turmoil of the book burning fireman Guy Montag with a selected few of the mind-rending themes from the novel by Ray Bradbury.
In his novel, Bradbury had the time and luxury to explore in detail the many themes of his richly textured work, most notably the interacting triangle of technology, education, and human ennui. In the movie version, Truffaut hints at how human society has perverted this triangle to arrive at the social structure that Bradbury thought not too far from his own.
Oskar Werner plays a deeply troubled Guy Montag whose surface joy at being a fireman is quickly put to the test by a light-headed female neighbor (Clarisse, a double role by Julie Christie, who also plays his wife Linda). One of the minor themes of the book is also present in the film: that the love of books is contagious. Both book and film play up this disease metaphor with fire as the cauterizing agent. Clarisse 'infects' Guy early on with an innocuous question--'Are you happy?' Guy, of course, thinks that he is, but he soon resorts to stealing the books that he is supposed to burn. The turning point for Guy and the audience is the scene where an old woman chooses to die with her books than to live without them. Just before she self-immolates, she cries out to the firemen (interestingly enough, she looks at Guy as if she senses that he is ripe for infection), "Books are alive; they speak to me!" Later, when Guy is trying to convince Linda, whose brain is surely turned to mush-paste by the enemy of free thought, interactive television, he uses much the same phrasing. Still later, Guy attempts to reach Linda's female friends by reading to them from a forbidden book. The result in both cases is the same. Both Linda and her friends are 'immune' to the infection.
Cyril Cusack, as fire Chief Beatty, has a much reduced role. In the novel, he provides much needed background so that the mad world of his society has some philosophical underpinning. Truffaut uses Beatty mostly as a flat character who stands in opposition to Montag's re-humanification. Still, Cusack manages to invest his character with the subtext as one who is driven to suicide to counter the deadening insensitivity of the world that he partly helped to create. Why else would he give a known traitor a flamethrower after telling Guy that he was under arrest?
The end of the film shows a society in which all surviving book lovers combine to prepare for the day when they will emerge from the shadows of a nuclear war to infect others with the notion that it is not books that are bad, but rather it is the use to which words are put that makes them so. The closing scene of a kindly, dying old man teaching his forbidden knowledge to his youthful successor teaches us too that books are no more than a metaphor for the mind. To destroy the one is to destroy the other.
Rating: 
Summary: Movie good - ending so-so
Review: Based on the legendary book, the movie does a good job in depicting the not-too-distant future in which in books are banned and firemen are used to enforce the ban by burning books. The society is presented as facist, with children reciting their multiplication tables in an emotionless, almost mechanical manner, people learning self-defense on massive, almost monstrous television screens, or the public gleefully laughing as police forcefully give one of those "long haired sooty intellectual types" a haircut. Regretfully, it loses its "fire" at the end. While the book ends with World War III (or is it IV?) breaking out, the movie ends with the hero in a commune of free thinkers, and a boy learning a story. Like the movie Gattaca of later years, though, I will say Fahrenheit 451 offers an intriguing view of what could be.
Rating: 
Summary: The worst movie ever made
Review: If you read one review for this movie, let it be mine. I don't know what sort of valium these other critics are on, but if you are a reasonable person you will abhorr Fahrenheit 451. They took Ray Bradbury's classic, and butchered it beyond all recognition. I have forgotten most of what happens (thankfully), but I will never be able to extract that dreadful music played during the firetruck sequences from my memory. To date, this has been the worst movie I have ever seen. To poor, even, to rent for a laugh. I suggest we take Cpt Beatty's advice for this one, and BURN IT!
Rating:
Summary: 451 mmmmm as anyone besides Adolf tried it?
Review: Yes, the book is more intricate; however, the movie captures the essence of the story. This was a well-put together movie and stands on its own with any other of this genre. I still watch this movie periodically to see what I misses while anticipating the next seen. Every time the government tracks down an e-mail virus suspect I get visions of Montag (Oskar Werner) being tracked down on camera. I expect the TV announcer to tell me to go to the front door and look for the perpetrator.
Try watching the movie first then read the book ISBN: 0345410017 and if you like Oskar Werner in a movie you should look at "Shoes of the Fisherman" (1968) ASIN: 630436593
Rating:
Summary: Opposite's Attract
Review: The movie is one of a kind. Instead of cristizing for it's 60's approach to the future, the film was mostly a "wacth it and then talk about it". Though a little far-fecthed,on Truffiet's thought, he shows the real meaning of the Bradbury's book and not the little parts ( as we know the film was low budgeted.)
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't deserve title of "451"
Review: As a movie....it is average. This is not a movie I would use with students because the "future" still looks very 60's-like. Also, the story-line has been changed drastically to the point that it does't fit the book (as a result..shouldn't be 451). The movie also misses some critical points of the book....nuclear war and Montag's loss of mildred/linda..as well as other points of interest in the book. For its time, it was probably good, but it is very outdated and should/could be filmed again with use of better effects. Keep in mind...this book takes place post 2000....needed more imagination about the future and less 60's/Brady Bunch style.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic cinema
Review: Truffaut delivers an amazing film. The stilted dialogue and artificial manner of the actors, often criticized, actually contributes to the vision of a future society in which all intellectual reflection and creativity has been supressed and stifled. I have heard it said that Werner wanted to play the character of Montag as a fascist, whereas Truffaut wanted Montag to have a more vulnerable appearance. Truffaut seems to have got his way, and it works remarkably well. The scene in which Montag picks his way, word by word, through the opening lines of Dicken's 'David Copperfield' is truly moving. Similarly, other citizens of this synthetic state reveal their vulnerability at various points as they struggle to express their suppressed humanity (eg. the commuters touching themselves on the train; Linda's friend fighting to hold back her tears as Montag 'cruelly' recites from a novel). This is a film that warns of the dangers of living in a cultural and historical vacuum. To quote Goethe: 'He who refuses to draw on three thousand years of history is living from hand to mouth.' The world Truffaut (in turn inspired by Ray Bradbury's novella) envisages, is a world in which the present is unconnected to anything else. Houses have always been fireproof, remarks Montag. It has always been the duty of firemen to start fires (in order to burn books), never to put them out. It is a poor world, where the dullest and most lacklustre conversation is lapped up by the masses as entertainment (the cousin's play). I know many people who live hand to mouth like that, to borrow Goethe's metaphor. Truffaut's warning is for them. Sets and effects are generally rather lame, though they are compensated for by Bernard Herrmann's excellent (as usual) score. There are myriad memorable sequences in which the music combines brilliantly with Roeg's photography to great effect (Montag and Linda's love scene; the final 'book people' scene). Truffaut's love of literature and culture is evident at every point, and a knowledge of his other films will demonstrate why he found Bradbury's book such enticing material.
Rating:
Summary: I am Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Review: I wanted to see this film because of the music by Bernard Herrmann, because this sound track was being sold used and I didn't want to get it import. I didn't expect it to have other film scores on there, but no matter. Joel McNeely had all the tempoes right, as usual. I was also surprised to see that Joel was here in this state to conduct the scores to these films, and I wish I could've been there while he conducted. Thank you Joel for re-recording this beautiful music by Bernard Herrmann!
Rating:
Summary: LOVE OF A GREAT MOVIE
Review: I loved every thing about this movie. It would be difficult to make a bad movie to such a great book. The people who criticize it obviously don't know the true meaning of this book. It teaches a lot about the wourld and the things in it. It sends out a great message and should be taken seriously.
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