SKM, 1969

starring: Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, and Robert Drivas

directed by: Jack Smight

the plot: In Depression-era America, a young drifter named Willie (Drivas) encounters Carl (Steiger), a grizzled hobo who travels with a small dog and not much else. Willie is taken aback, however, when Carl shares a strange secret: he’s covered in tattoos that can come to life and provide glimpses of the past and the future. Carl claims to have received the tattoos (he calls them “skin illustrations”) from Felicia (Bloom), a mysterious woman from the future who vanished soon after giving him the tattoos. Incredulous, Willie gazes at the tattoos and, soon enough, he sees frightening visions of the future. Each vision tells a different story. In one, Carl and Felicia are parents who discover their children are using a high-tech nursery to plot against them. In another, Carl is the commander of a doomed spaceship crew trapped on a planet where it never stops raining. And, in the final vision, Carl and Felicia must make a harrowing sacrifice on the eve of nuclear war. As Willie goes mad, he reveals his own secret to Carl: he knows the whereabouts of Felicia.

why it’s good: Anthology films are tricky and, with some notable exceptions (like George Romero’s “Creepshow”), they usually don’t hold together all that well. In “The Illustrated Man,” director Jack Smight and screenwriter Howard Kreitsek try to stitch together three of the 18 stories from Ray Bradbury’s 1951 sci-fi anthology, but it turns out to be a raggedy mess. Things go wrong immediately in the film’s framing device. Rod Steiger gnaws on scenery, intermittently gains and loses a southern accent, and rambles on and on about the origins of his tattoos. Maybe the role of the Illustrated Man was supposed to be filled with pathos, or perhaps the grim realization that fate is inescapable; however, Steiger is just angry. He shouts at the bugs and little critters near the river where he’s camping and spends a lot of time shouting at Drivas that his tattoos aren’t tattoos—they’re skin illustrations. Steiger is only a little more reined in during the film’s three stories, which, taken on their own, are intriguing and subtle with some good psychedelic moments. But Steiger rampages through them, mostly overshadowing the good performances delivered by Drivas and Bloom. Why Smight chose to tie all the stories and the framing device together into a single narrative is one of the strangest mysteries in “The Illustrated Man.” It makes increasingly less sense and draws Drivas and Steiger into a confusing conflict that closes out the film. Bradbury’s stories are elegiac with a child-like wonder, and had Smight kept those qualities in his adaptation, “The Illustrated Man” might have achieved some kind of balance. Instead, it’s an extended freak-out that barely keeps it together, much like Steiger’s tattooed narrator.

why you should own it: “The Illustrated Man” might be good for fans of ’60s psychedelic cinema, but otherwise, it can be skipped. Director Zack Snyder has been tapped for a remake of “The Illustrated Man,” which, if Snyder’s previous films are any indication, will likely be a Video Vault pick in 2051.