Montag is married to Linda (Julie Christie, in a dual role), a bored and boring housewife who has joined an interactive cult called "The Family." Montag, drifting apart from his wife, falls in with Clarisse (Julie Christie, in long wig). Clarisse is a member of an underground group dedicated to preserving literacy. She influences Montag, who steals a book from a fire. Eventually Montag leaves his wife and escapes to a hidden encampment with Clarisse and other literati.

This was Francois Truffaut's only full-length English-language film. He chose Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Psycho) to score it shortly after Herrmann had been fired from Alfred Hitchcock's production of Torn Curtain because of creative differences. This Tribute Film Classics release restores all of Herrmann's original orchestrations and includes cues and sections of cues cut from the final version of the film.

In addition to retaining Hermann's original orchestral voicings, producers William Stromberg, Anna Bonn and John Morgan went back to Herrmann's original manuscripts (or photocopies) and pieced them together as the composer had intended. The result, brilliantly performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, is a must-have disk for Herrmann's many fans.

Heated exchanges lead to a cool score

Herrmann himself questioned why Truffaut would not ask one of his friends, such as Boulez or Stockhausen, both recognized "modern" composers, to produce futuristic music for this futuristic film. Truffaut replied, "They'll give me music of the 20th century, but you will give me music of the 21st."

Yet Hermann chose to work with a more conventional, tonal approach as opposed to the atonal experimentations common to the day. In retrospect, it seems that Truffaut was right. The film's music has not become dated, while that of Stockhausen and the others has come to seem increasingly experimental and of its period.

Herrmann has created a number of distinct motifs and themes in the score's 47 brief cues (few are longer than 2 minutes and only two longer than 3), lending humanity to the allegorical drama of the story itself. The "Fire Station" motif has a rapid and mechanical pace that suggests the automatic incendiary devices of the firemen. Other themes suggest the empty melancholy of this anti-intellectual, state-controlled future.

Also included on the disk is the complete music for "Walking Distance," an episode of The Twilight Zone scored by Herrmann, in which Martin Sloan (Gig Young) returns to the town of his youth to find it unchanged and his boyhood self still living there. This music is far gentler and warmer than that of Fahrenheit 451, and with the simultaneous release of Herrmann's wonderful Mysterious Island score, it provides an excellent overview of Herrmann's stylistic breadth.