AaronCapenBanner Based on Ray Bradbury's novel about a mysterious tattooed man(played gruffly by Rod Steiger) who meets up with a young wanderer(played by Robert Drivas) who recounts to him the circumstances that led him to be covered in tattoos, and how he is pursuing the mysterious(time-traveling?) woman who did it to him(played by Claire Bloom).The three tales adapted are: 'The Veldt' - Inconclusive and dull. 'The Long Rain' - The best of the three, but anticlimactic, & 'The Last Night Of The World' - Ineffective.Stories work better in the book, but were three of many; why those in particular were chosen is unknown, but film does not do it justice. Despite having a melancholy air, the results are unsatisfying.

mindbird It seems to me that the key to this movie is the mystery of the banked blazing passion of the character of Claire Bloom. It looks like sexual passion, but as the movie unfolds it reveals itself as raging agony.She inscribes scenes of terribly flawed men too willing to sacrifice others, scenes of terrible losses, scenes intended to make the viewer KNOW what rotten hopeless greedy self-centered vicious little apes we really are. This woman is a deeply civilized person who has suffered losses so terrible she is driven to travel in time and torment a surrogate for the man who caused them. She does it with exquisite controlled cruelty--the tattooing. The stories get closer to what really happened to her. She leaves in order to refrain from the culmination of her passion, which would be murder and not sex. She doesn't care that Steiger himself never hurt her because she knows now there are no innocents. And Rod Steiger is perfect--he FEELS like her innocent victim. All he wanted at the beginning was to be with this beautiful woman. It's just that she is incandescently bitter at humanity and he is human. He is no innocent, and by the time we meet him he knows it well. He knows every person who looks at his skin illustrations learns that s/he is no innocent, either, and then hates him. He is now as embittered and vengeful as the woman was, and that's her revenge on humanity.But then there's the stilted, awkward, vacuous non-performance of the other guy. It was as if they grabbed some carpenter's assistant to read through the script with Steiger because the real actor was passed out in his trailer. I thought Rod Steiger got more acting-back from the dog. (Many here seem to respect this actor--maybe in some other movie, but not this one.) This is what prevents it from being a masterpiece.

whitesheik The Illustrated Man is now on DVD - it's a reasonably okay transfer (the color is a little off, but not much), but as always people who "review" these things on the IMDb trumpet "misunderstood masterpiece" so often it's laughable. No, this film, which was a critical and box-office disaster, has not become a masterpiece in the intervening years - it's the same bad film it always was. Anyone who says (condescendingly, I might add) "It's for thinkers" clearly knows little about Mr. Bradbury, cinema, or thinking. The film has no sense of rhythm or pace, and it just sits there like a dead herring. Mr. Steiger is fine, so is Claire Bloom and Robert Drivas, but the script is bad, and the normally reliable Jack Smight seems hamstrung by the material.

kaosdesign Saw this movie years ago late one night on telly when I was about 12 and watched again recently. Glad to say it stood up to expectation, a personal all time fave. Considering it was made in 1969 it was well ahead of its time. One of the few book adaptations that actually worked. The sets, props and characters were still impressive, even though the moog soundtrack gets a bit irritating at times, but it was the late 60's. A great dark and twisted way to present a selection of Bradbury stories which would be a big ask for any film maker to pull off without a lot of flack from the sci-fi purists. With todays movie technology would like to see a remake of this film, particularly the Long Rain and the Veld. Steiger was on top form in this film, who hated snakes and the woman who made his life a living hell...'When I fiiind her, I gonna keeeel her.'