Fahrenheit 451

After suffering the humiliation of having his score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1966 film Torn Curtain tossed aside and replaced, Bernard Herrmann turned right around and set to work on a film score that many feel contains his finest work: Fahrenheit 451, released in 1967 by Universal. The movie, which is director Francois Truffaut's sole English-language film, puts on celluloid Ray Bradbury's classic and terrifying novel of the same name – a tale of a not-so-distant future in which books, any and all books, are deemed to be subversive by a repressive mega-government. Herrmann's score proves once again that some of the finest film scoring efforts achieve their greatness by going firmly against the superficial grain of the film. The Fahrenheit 451 score is intense, human, and deeply personal (and, as such, sometimes quite unhappy or ugly) in a cinematic world that is cold and absolutely inhuman. What Herrmann provides is less a depiction of or even response to the elements of plot and cinematography, but more a ticket into some internal cross-section of the protagonist, Guy Montag, that finds its way to the screen only fleetingly. Beyond that, it is a musical bill of faith in the eternally unbreakable human spirit, an element that comes into the movie only at its very end. The movie often moves along in two very different layers – sight and sound (film proper) and musical score – and the effect can be overwhelming.