This is the first (and only) Truffaut film in English. This is the first (and only) incursion by the author of Les Quatre-cents coups (1959) into genre cinema: science fiction / speculative. The distaste that many critics have for Fahrenheit 451 reveals more about themselves than about the feature or its director.

The fact is: François Truffaut made two great films in dedication to his two great passions: cinema (La Nuit Américaine, 1973) and books (Fahrenheit 451, 1966). The latter is also a declaration of love for the art of Alfred Hitchcock, who inspired the politique des auteurs by the young critic François, which revolutionized the seventh art.

The following elements present in the less appreciated film by Trufaut are deeply Hitchcockian: the female doppelgänger (Linda / Clarisse, both played by Julie Christie), the protagonist Montag’s (Oskar Wernwe) dream / nightmare with his wife’s doppelgänger and the soundtrack signed by none other than Bernard Herrmann.

Furthermore, the dystopia imagined by Ray Bradbury continues to haunt us: in our “post-truth” era, pyromaniac firefighters are not at all surprising, but still scary. In the scene in which the lady who owns a library prefers to let herself burn with her books rather than live without them, there appears (very briefly) a paperback edition of the Cahiers du Cinéma.

Truffaut, there, was prophetic: the scene resonates today in the collective resignation request by the entire editorial and journalistic staff of the magazine last year, whose editorial independence was threatened after the purchase by a financial conglomerate that has already expressed the desire for “changes”.