I used to read the book over and over as a kid. It was a short book that fit perfectly in the time it took to get to my grandparents house. I haven’t seen this movie for a while, but the image of a bunch of hippies memorizing books in the forest will always stand out in my mind. It makes me smile.

Just about everything is wrong with this movie. Oskar Werner is terrible as Montag. Casting Julie Cristie as both Montag’s wife and Clarisse is a mistake (Clarisse is a teenager for crissake.) The score by Bernard Herrmann is lovely but totally out of place. And the focus on book burning is simple-minded. The story isn’t just about burning books, it’s about a lost and dehumanized society.

I got the impression that Truffaut made the movie so he could burn piles of his favorite literary classics in front of the camera, as if that were shocking enough. Instead of giving us a fully-formed interpretation of the novel, he padded the movie with Hitchcockian tricks and cinematic quotations. This movie is just bad.