Review: The Illustrated Man (1969)
The Illustrated Man is one of Ray Bradbury’s greatest works, but it is not a cohesive unit. As with so many of Bradbury’s short story collections (save The Martian Chronicles), the connective tissue between the stories is rather forced: a young man meets a drifter completely covered in tattoos. As he gazes upon the tattoos on the man’s flesh, they come to life. Each short story in the collection unveils the story behind the individual tattoos. The illustrated man himself is the least of the collection’s interests; the stories are the focus. Jack Smight’s 1969 adaptation of The Illustrated Man lacks the breadth of Bradbury’s collection, since it only adopts three stories in addition to the frame narrative. It also chooses rather strangely to focus on the frame narrative above all else. It’s a near-fatal mistake, one that accounts for the film’s uneasy tone. And yet, The Illustrated Man still conveys the surrealness of Bradbury’s work and retains an appealing creakiness from its position in the transitional Hollywood era of the 1960s.
The movie is something of a cult artifact. In 2006, it was the winner of an IMDb poll to release a long out-of-print movie on DVD. In more recent years, it was the subject of an affectionate episode of Video Archives, hosted by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, who had a lot of fun quoting Rod Steiger’s passionate line reading of “They’re skin illustrations!” (The soundtrack release for Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood also includes a radio spot promoting the movie.) The Illustrated Man is surely not the ideal adaptation of Bradbury. To be fair, however, this has never happened over the past 70 years.
Starring Rod Steiger as the Illustrated Man, the movie expands the frame narrative of Bradbury’s collection and, as I said, only adapts three stories: “The Veldt,” “The Long Rain,” and “The Last Night of the World.” In all three stories, the same actors appear as in the frame narrative. Steiger always plays the lead: the father in two, the captain in another. Claire Bloom, who plays the mysterious woman who gave Steiger the tattoos, is the female lead in the stories. Robert Drivas, who plays the young man, Willie, in the frame narrative, typically takes an ancillary role in the stories: the doctor in “The Veldt” or a young officer in “The Long Rain.”
“The Veldt” segment is the best of the bunch as it’s one of the most memorable of Bradbury’s stories. It follows parents in a future world who are concerned about the violent African savannah (or veldt) setting that has taken over their holographic nursery and where their kids are spending an inordinate amount of time. They forbid the kids from spending time there, but the children bide their time and ultimately take their revenge. Like “Zero Hour,” which doesn’t appear in the movie, “The Veldt” shows Bradbury’s uncanny ability to tap into the dark side of childhood imagination. In the movie, the savannah itself might not be convincing (there are no sagebrush California mountains in the background of the Great Rift Valley), but the overall effect of the story remains in place.
“The Long Rain” is a curious adaptation, as it registers in Bradbury’s collection mostly for its concept: a group of astronauts try to find shelter on a Venus that never stops raining. In the movie, a soaked and sullen Steiger and Drivas, along with a few other actors, drudge through a wet set that looks like it belongs in Star Trek. Eventually, they find potential salvation in a sun dome, but not before individually succumbing to madness. Smight’s direction is too straightforward to convey the psychological madness of Bradbury’s story. There’s no psychological tension here, nor any visual tricks to make us feel trapped with the characters. Instead, it relies mostly on the set design and the never-ending rain to convey the feeling of claustrophobia. But the story is about the mental effect of the never-ending rain, not just the rain itself.
“The Last Night of the World” is the most abbreviated of the stories, but it’s also the shortest in Bradbury’s collection. A husband and wife realize that their world is going to end that night, so they discuss whether it’s humane to euthanize their children in advance of the inevitable apocalypse. This segment finds Steiger at his most reserved, and it’s mostly affecting. Of course, the adaptation from Howard B. Kreitsek (who wrote the entire film) reduces much of the work to Bradbury’s famously dour ending (perhaps an influence on Frank Darabont’s The Mist?), when the appeal of the story is largely in the quiet lead-up to that ending and its tonal certainty.
While these three stories are the prime movers of The Illustrated Man, Smight’s film spends much of its time digging into and expanding on the backstory of Steiger’s Illustrated Man. We see him with the mysterious woman who gave him his tattoos, which plays like a twisted 1950s soap opera. The tone of the film is undeniably odd, simultaneously cynical and sentimental. Steiger has fun with the material, chewing scenery whenever he can, barking at Drivas, who seems hopelessly outmatched by the Oscar winner. It’s admittedly entertaining. Tarantino is right: there’s a certain joy in watching Steiger demand that Drivas call his tattoos “skin illustrations.”
Smight’s editorial approach to the film is fascinating, despite being decried in contemporary reviews. Rather than allowing individual stories to play out uninterrupted, Smight often cuts in reactions of Drivas watching the tattoos, as well as Steiger’s Illustrated Man watching Drivas’s Willie. It gives the film a voyeuristic energy, which takes on sensual qualities due to the hazy cinematography and heavy use of vaseline on the lens. The description almost sounds amateurish, like a crude 70s softcore feature, but the effect is more similar to Frank Perry’s The Swimmer, which creates a dreamlike atmosphere utterly specific to the late 1960s. Early defenders of the film who spoke to its countercultural appeal were not entirely wrong. The movie exudes a hippie quality that is more distinct in retrospect.
Smight’s The Illustrated Man is hardly an ideal adaptation of Ray Bradbury, as it’s too much an abbreviation of Bradbury’s collection to satisfy fans of such a rich collection of stories. But it’s also not a disaster. There’s a curiously beguiling quality to this work, which keeps your interest despite the sometimes soggy storytelling. Perhaps the power of Bradbury’s writing is such that it registers even in a diminished adaptation. Or perhaps Smight had more of a consistent approach than was credited at the time. Whatever the case, The Illustrated Man remains a true curiosity from its era.
6 out of 10
The Illustrated Man (1969, USA)
DIrected by Jack Smight; written by Howard B. Kreitsek, based on the book by Ray Bradbury; starring Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, Robert Drivas.
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