Simply A Masterpiece

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

It seems a lot of people hated this film, which isn't surprising at all. After all, the movie is unique, interesting, visually terrific, the story is a little disjointed, the title character is not a charismatic hero, the dog is kept in a bag, the music score doesn't have any Bon Jovi songs in it, and there is a definite lack of Tom Cruise - or any kind of tomocruisiness or leodecapricity.TIM is definitely not for the average movie-going Joe Schmoe. It is a very stylish take on one of Bradbury's LESSER anthologies. He is a good writer, but his TIM collection of stories is not as well-written as some of his other material. Hence if it's true that Bradbury hates this movie, he should actually be glad they made something out of very little. By far the best movie version of anything he's ever written.Someone also mentions that Rod Serling hated this film. Who cares what Serling liked or hated? He had nothing to do with this film, and besides: all his post early-60s screen efforts were crap anyway.One person even complained that only 3 stories were included in the movie. I guess he would have preferred to have fifteen 4-minute stories instead.Oh yeah... On the message board a person under the name of "viggolicious_x" refers to this as the "worst movie ever". If a person by that name (probably a teeny-bopper in love with 50 years older Viggo Mortensen) says TIM is an awful film then that is the highest recommendation any movie can get, methinks...

This movie is just not very good. That's the bottom line, despite Ray Bradbury, former Oscar Winner Steiger, and some good cinematography. The sum total (only "1" star) does not equal the whole of its parts, which should add up to a high rating. I completely agree with the noted critic Roger Ebert's review in the Chicage Sun-Times of August 6, 1969, wherein he gave it 2 stars, noted its many flaws, and generally did not like this movie. His comments are interesting and insightful.This is not the worst movie ever made- the acting is OK but like the rest of the movie the acting is just not good enough to accomplish anything of value.I saw this movie in a theater in 1969 with some of the few people who saw it then. The theater was about 90% empty and was silent as a stone, except for possibly an occasional yawn. No one at the time seemed to care for it, it was not regarded as "artsy" or even notable sci-fi. It came and went quickly and was soon forgotten. I wish I could give it more than a 1 star rating because of the talent involved, but I can't help feeling the same as in 1969: Why? Why was such great talent and ability assembled to produce...this?Try as I might, I still can't make a case for it even now, so many years after I (and Roger Ebert) first viewed it.

Science-fiction films in the 1950s and 1960s more often than not were clichés of one another. Any one of us who watched "Creature Feature" on Saturday nights in the Washington, D.C. area back in 1970's and 1980's ought to know. Some of you out there may have picked up a similar program that featured horror and science-fiction movies. "The Illustrated Man" broke away from that overly trite mainstream of science-fiction movies that Gene Roddenberry shoved down the throats of many sci-fi buffs in the 1960's and 1970's. You were always being taken off guard by the next scene. You were not tortured with any egg-headed aliens or men with leprechaun ears or ray guns like on "Star Trek". Not that "Star Trek" was a bad show. It's just been over-plagiarized by movie producers of other science-fiction yarns. Rod Steiger gave this film his all, because although he was obnoxious as the illustrated man himself, he was like this either very charming, very intelligent, very family-oriented, or very caring individual in the stories that came alive whenever the young man drifter observed his body illustrations. Seeing so many different personalities played by one actor shows real talent in my opinion. I first saw "The Illustrated Man" on some local channel on a small black and white TV set my sister gave me for Christmas when I was living out in Los Angeles back in the 1990's. I saw it once again on a big-screen color TV set on the Sci-Fi Channel after I moved back to Northern Virginia and liked it both times I saw it. Nowadays and even in recent years past the sci-fi movie and television entertainment scene has either become inundated with virtual reality in the form of "Spiderman" or "Lost" or systematically sterile scripts in the form of "The X-files" or "Millenium". "The Illustrated Man" had unique qualities that set it apart from all the others. That to me is true science-fiction. Not imitating what the next movie director is doing.

To me, this is nearly the most underrated weird movie ever (and I say "weird movie" because it's hard to put into one of those subcategories). I've heard it said that audiences don't respond too well to most "anthology films" (though that's funny, because you always hear that audiences have such a bad attention span - I certainly do - and what kind of movie takes LESS of an attention span than THAT kind?). Of course, The Illustrated Man is an anthology film that doesn't even move in a straight line, like most others (Tales From The Crypt and so on). Instead of being three stories linked by one other, it's three stories linked by TWO others (Carl and Willie in the woods and Carl and Felicia in the house). So both of those things could go against it, though they shouldn't. (In some ways, it's almost the "2001" of that kind of movie, as far as being hard to "digest.") No one could make a tiny line sound incredibly significant like Rod Steiger, or be intimidating, or physically threatening, in such a BELIEVABLE way, and this film is full of those moments. And also, he goes from WARNING Robert Drivas about the illustrations, to ENJOYING the effect they're having on him. Drivas (in a helpless voice, because the pictures are "holding" him there) : What makes you think you can keep me here? / Steiger (smiling in an absolutely evil way) : What makes you think you can go? And of course, Claire Bloom was perfectly believable as the mysterious artist who seduces Carl into accepting what she does (when he seems surprised only after being HALF-COVERED with the pictures, you BELIEVE it). And Robert Drivas, whom I know from very few other things, was great as Willie, and as "Williams" in "The Long Rain." (Don Dubbins, who was in that story only, was also very good. He played another stranded spaceman in a Twlight Zone episode, and a trapped miner in a Kung Fu episode, oddly enough.) I only have a few complaints, and unfortunately, one isn't so small. "The Veldt", which is the longest of the three stories (though shorter than the "links," themselves), gets genuinely depressing in places. The original story was about the bad side of automation for one family, and had a "shock" kind of ending, but the film version was about an all-out "crumbling" marriage and "dysfunctional" family, and didn't completely go with the rest of the film. Also, at the very end of the movie (and this is my only partial spoiler), you see a character with his eye "closed over" like a boxer's (among other things), which is about the only gruesomeness in the whole film, and doesn't quite belong either. One reason I know how underrated it is, is how little effect it's had on "pop culture" - you don't (as far as I know) hear it referred to in documentaries on tattoos, comedy scenes about them, one-liners about them, serious criticism of them (and now more than ever, a REMOTELY well-known movie, all about THAT subject, WOULD be referred to). Also (though there would be "commercial" reasons for this), I've seen the outsides of countless "tattoo parlours", but I've never seen one called "Skin Illustrations." (You'd think that at least one Bradbury fan / tattoo artist would do that.) The only POSSIBLE, indirect reference I can think of was a "Barney Miller" episode, where an artist hated the word "parlour" and insisted on the word "studio." Anyway, it's no joke to say (as I think one person here did) that after knowing this film, in the back of your mind, at least, you might be a little afraid to even say the word "tattoos". Once you hear Rod Steiger say, "They're not tattoos, they're skin illustrations!!", it really stays with you.