This was Truffaut's only English-language film, which makes one wonder why he cast Oscar Werner, an actor with a thick German accent, in the lead role. Truffaut and Werner are said to have come to despise each other by the end of filming, and some claim that Werner intentionally performed as woodenly as possible just to infuriate the director (he also cut his hair before filming the last scene to purposely cause a glaring continuity problem!). Those anecdotes aside, the movie has many more problems than successful moments. Nicolas Roeg's cinematography is often brilliant, but Truffaut's direction is all over the place, his editing very clunky, the attempted "special effects" calamitous, and Bernard Herrmann's score sounds like it was written for a completely different movie. The acting is sufficient, and a few scenes are wonderful (the old lady choosing to be burned alive with her books, for example), but mostly this is a case where reading the book would be far preferable. Which, I suppose, is the point after all. I did enjoy seeing Truffaut's very hip assortment of books being burned, and it made me want to get back to reading, which I think I used to do before reality TV reduced my brain to cottage cheese.
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