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THE ILLUSTRATED MAN
Rating: 
USA. 1968.
Director – Jack Smight, Screenplay – Howard B. Kreitsek, Based on the Short Stories The Veldt, The Long Rains and The Last Night of the World from the Short Story Collection by Ray Bradbury, Producers – Howard B. Kreitsek & Ted Mann, Photography – Philip Lathorp, Music – Jerry Goldsmith, Special Effects – Ralph Webb, Makeup – Fred Blau, Tattoos – James E. Reynolds, Production Design – Richard Sylbert. Production Company – Warners/SKM Productions.
Cast:
Rod Steiger (Carl), Robert Drivas (Willie), Claire Bloom (Felicia), Tim Weldon (John), Christie Matchet (Anna)
Plot: During The Depression a drifter, Willie, hitchhikes across country. As he settles down for the night in the open, Willie comes across Carl, a strange and brooding man who wears an overcoat and gloves despite the heat. The man opens his coat to reveal that he has tattoos or, as he prefers to call them, ‘skin illustrations’, from head to foot. While Carl sleeps, Willie sits and watches the illustrations as they come to life to tell stories. The Veldt:– Two parents buy a nursery that simulates different environments for their children to play in. They become concerned when the children demonstrate a preference for an African veldt scene and then start feeding the lions, even though there are no lions in the program. The Long Rains:– Four astronauts trek across Venus from the site of their crashlanding to a survival shelter. But tensions within the party and the maddening effect of Venus’s ceaseless rain endanger the journey. The Last Night of the World:– Everybody has a dream that the world is going to end that night. It is decided that all the children will be given suicide pills to prevent them suffering. One couple give the pills to their children, but elect not to take them themselves.
The works of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury have never fared very well on screen. Part of the problem is Ray Bradbury’s writing itself. Screen science-fiction is often construed as being planets, robots and spaceships and little more than adventure stories. Bradbury’s work swims in poetic allegory and densely laden imagery and doesn’t quite fit into what most people construe science-fiction to be. Ray Bradbury is really a sort of science-fiction equivalent of Walt Whitman – he pines for a forgotten smalltown American childhood summer and a time when progress and technology made the world a less complicated place. Even a hard dystopian work of Bradbury’s like Fahrenheit 451 (1951) seems less an ideological polemic than one that that nostalgically mourns a loss of the literary imagination. There have been occasions where Bradbury has worked on screen well, usually when he pens the piece himself – the film adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), the tv series The Ray Bradbury Theater (1986-92) – and those where he definitely has ended up badly mangled – such as here, the tv mini-series The Martian Chronicles (1980) and A Sound of Thunder (2005).
The short story is a form Bradbury where tends to work at best rather than at novel length. The Illustrated Man adapts several of the short stories from Bradbury’s 1951 short story collection of the same title. But the film is a disappointment. While its ambitions are in the right place, the film attaches itself to Bradbury with a singularly pedestrian regard.
With The Veldt the filmmakers do the near-impossible – they take a foolproof story and screw it up. The premise of the story is deadeningly simple – parents get virtual playroom for the kids, kids become obsessed with the African scenario, and then in a twist ending the parents fatally find out that the lions are real. The twist is something that should come with either a piquant drollness or else as a sinister surprise, but the filmed episode gives the twist away from the start. The adaptation is clod-fisted and the piece moves toward the ending devoid of suspense or buildup. The episode is even further padded out with dull lectures where characters stand about and tell each other what future life is like – and considering that this is a standard issue antiseptic white vacuform plastic future, this proves rather dreary. The episode though does feature what must be the very first screen appearance of the concept of Virtual Reality, even before such a term was ever coined.
The Long Rains is the best episode, mainly by default. Venus looks quite unworldly, all twisted roots and rocks and photographed in monochrome grey. The monotonous downpour of rain on the soundtrack wears on one’s nerves – and in this regard the episode does a quite effective job of portraying the fraying effect the rain has on the astronauts sanity. The story is only flawed by having to work Claire Bloom in at the end (all the characters in each story are played by the same actors) – What is she doing there in the survival shelter? Is she from another expedition? A prostitute? If the latter, as seems to be the case, it seems difficult to conceive why someone would stay on such an inhospitable world beset by so few expeditions purely for the astronauts pleasure.
The Last Night of the World is so slight it seems forgotten by the time the film is over. The pastorality of it all seems incredibly bland – people live in a tent, herd animals graze outside and everyone wears flowing silks and Grecian-styled costumery everywhere. Amid this the sight of Rod Steiger prancing about in boxer shorts looks faintly ridiculous. And why doesn’t Robert Drivas appear – if The Long Rains was altered out of shape to include Claire Bloom then why couldn’t he have been wound in here as a neighbour come to discuss the situation or some such? That said the story’s fault is more Ray Bradbury’s than the film’s – it was a very slight idea on the page and probably an ill choice for an adaptation.
It is really the linking story that is the most interesting part of the whole film. The dialogue is good and Rod Steiger gives a gruff, brooding performance in the title role. In fact the film gives the linking idea much more substance than Ray Bradbury did on the page. The idea of the illustrated man was a fairly slim concept in the book – the framing device takes up less than two pages – and it has been considerably embellished here. The illustrations, which required something like an eight-hour makeup job for Rod Steiger, are beautifully stylized. But in the end The Illustrated Man is a failure – in adapting the stories the poetic essence of Bradbury is missing and all the filmmakers have added is a lumbering, hollow pretentiousness.
Other Ray Bradbury screen adaptations are:– the aforementioned The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) from his short story The Foghorn; the alien invader classic It Came from Outer Space (1953) from his original screenplay; Francois Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 (1966); the dreary The Martian Chronicles tv mini-series (1980) from his classic book; the tv movie The Electric Grandmother (1980); the screenplay for the fine Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) from his own novel; his screenplay for the animated adaptation of the classic comic-strip Little Nemo in Slumberland (1992); the tv anthology series The Ray Bradbury Theater (1986-92) where he adapted his own stories and hosted the series; the screenplay for the animated childrens film The Halloween Tree (1993); Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998); and A Sound of Thunder (2005) based on Bradbury’s classic time travel story. The Veldt later became the framing device around which another Bradbury anthology, the Russian-made The Veldt (1987), was set. The Veldt and The Long Rains later received superior adaptations as episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater.
Director Jack Smight also directed the serial killer black comedy No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), the worthwhile Frankenstein adaptation Frankenstein: The True Story (1974), and the post-holocaust film Damnation Alley (1977). Smight is probably otherwise best known for the Paul Newman thriller Harper (1966) and big-budget films of the 1970s such as Airport 1975 (1974) and Midway (1977).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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