1984 (1956 film)

Plot

In the mid-1960s, nuclear war and devastation gave rise to three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. By 1984, London, with its bomb-proof ministry, is the capital of Airstrip One, a province of Oceania controlled by the all-powerful Party, embodied by the figurehead Big Brother. In spring 1984, Winston Smith, a member of the semi-elite Outer Party, encounters Julia, a woman he suspects may be a Thought Police member. Winston smuggles a small black diary past the electronic surveillance eye in his apartment and begins writing subversive thoughts.

His reverie is interrupted by Selina Parsons, a little girl who practices denouncing him as a traitor. Her father Robert invites Winston to the Chestnut Tree café, where they spot Rutherford and Jones, rehabilitated traitors. Winston later visits a junk shop, where Julia enters, causing him to flee. He is stopped by police and ordered to report to Administration.

There, a party officer reprimands him for socializing with the masses. At his Records Department job, Winston discovers a photo proving Jones and Rutherford innocent, but his superior O'Connor instructs him to destroy it. At a political rally, Julia passes Winston a note professing love. They meet in a meadow outside London, away from monitors, and make love.

Two weeks later, Winston proposes renting a room at the junk store, free of monitors, where he confides that O'Connor may be an Underground member.

Production

The 1956 film version was produced after a 1954 BBC-TV adaptation starring Peter Cushing and André Morell proved extremely popular with British audiences. Donald Pleasence, who had appeared in that BBC version as Syme, saw his character amalgamated with Parsons for the film. The script was co-written by William Templeton, who had adapted the novel for the 1953 US Studio One series. The character O'Brien was renamed O'Connor due to the shared surname of actor Edmond O'Brien, and Emmanuel Goldstein became Kalador. Like the earlier Animal Farm adaptation, the film was secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency and received a $100,000 subsidy from the U.S. Information Agency, and altered the book ending.

Release

When it reached American theaters in 1956, the film 1984 played on a double bill alongside another British sci-fi movie, The Gamma People. A.H. Weiler of the New York Times described it as "a stark, sober and thoughtful, if not altogether persuasive, film," noting that while the book was adapted "freely," the movie kept its core ideas and spirit. A Boston Globe critic felt it captured "the same sense of bleak horror and black apprehension" Orwell wrote about. However, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction found it "lifeless" when set against the BBC version.