CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Illustrated Man (1969)

In 1951, Ray Bradbury's anthology of eighteen short stories, The Illustrated Man, was first published in the United States. Nearly twenty years later, in 1969, a film version of the Bradbury material directed by Jack Smight (and scored by Jerry Goldsmith) was released in theaters. An omnibus or anthology film, Smight's movie starred Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom and Robert Drivas, and dramatized three sci-fi tales ("The Veldt," "The Long Rain" and "The Last Night of the World"). These vignettes were tied together by an umbrella story set in 1933 and -- in an interesting twist for the movie anthology format -- the film's starring triumvirate appeared in each tale as different characters, as well as in the wraparound, framing story.

The Illustrated Man commences in 1933 as a young drifter, Willie (Drivas) encounters a bellicose old carnie, Carl (Steiger) by idyllic lakeside. Willie very soon learns that Carl's entire body (yes, even his privates...) have been decorated with the most bizarre skin illustrations imaginable. Carl ascribes life and even sentience to these illustrations (and don't call them tattoos, either...), noting that he can feel them "squirmin'" and "movin' up" his back. The illustrations were created by a beautiful woman, a haunting siren named Felicia. Carl is now in search of Felicia and her house (which disappeared long ago...) because he wants to kill her. Why? His illustrated body has made Carl a pariah. And worse: those who gaze into the creepy illustrations can see their own future and their own deaths in them, and that doesn't exactly make Carl a popular guy at parties.

Who exactly is Felicia? Good question. "She had lived in the past and had lived in the future, and she put it all on me," says Carl at one point in the film. A voice over narration from Felicia also warns that "each person who tries to see beyond his time must face questions to which there cannot yet be proven answers."

Willie attempts to ferret out the mysteries of Carl, the illustrated man, but is soon seduced and beguiled by the imagery on the old man's body. Willie falls into the irresistible spell of the skin illustrations, and witnesses three cautionary tales from humanity's future. In the first ("The Veldt"), two parents (Steiger and Bloom) living in Baltimore worry about their children, who seem to be "embracing destructive thoughts" during their playtime. You see, the parents have purchased for their kids a new kind of technological nursery or playroom (a kind of early silver screen holodeck device...), and the children keep calling up a savanna in Africa: one where sleepy lion packs feed on carrion. A government therapist (Drivas) indicates to the parents that the nursery has indeed caused some problems in other families, but is not prepared for what happens with this particular family. As you might guess, the children arrange a trap for their parents in the nursery...

The second story (and the most impressive visually) is "The Long Rain." Here, a spaceship from the Unified States of Earth (really a re-dressed spaceship from Planet of the Apes [1968]) crashes on Venus and the crew slowly goes insane under the pressure and incessant noise of the non-stop, ubiquitous rain. The ship commander, played by a belligerent Steiger, attempts to hold his crew (Jason Evers, and Drivas once more...) together as they search the planet for the respite provided by Sun Domes; small habitats boasting all the luxuries of Earth (including "space whores.") The crew mutinies one at a time, and one crewman (Drivas) commits suicide. The colonel alone reaches the Sun Dome...where he finds Felicia waiting.

In the final story depicted in the film (and from Carl's tattoos), entitled "The Last Night of the World," Steiger and Bloom play another futuristic married couple fretting over the health of their children. In this case, however, the situation is far different than in "The Veldt." Steiger's character here has just returned from a "Final World Forum" where he reports that all the men shared the same apocalyptic dream. They had a vision that this is the last day of the world and that the human race will die during the night. To spare the children a possibly painful doomsday, this cabal of men has decided to put the children "to sleep" (using pills to be administered at bed time...). Bloom's character protests that "our children are everything! They're our future." But Steiger's character is insistent. "There is no future," he tells her, adding "You're subject to the ruling too." Bloom finally appears to convince her husband that they should not murder the children; but during the night, Steiger steals into their bedroom to spare them the end of the world. Guess what happens the next morning? The sun rises, the Earth lives, mankind survives. And Steiger has -- over his wife's humanitarian and maternal objections -- given his children the suicide pills.

Back at the lakeside in the 1930s, Willie is driven into a mad frenzy by these visions of unhappy, tragic futures. He then witnesses his own death: strangulation by the Illustrated Man! Willie makes a ham handed attempt to murder Carl in his sleep, then runs off, down a country road. But Carl isn't exactly dead yet. Wounded, he rises from his sleep, bloodied but not defeated...

Sound like a strange movie? Well, it is. I first saw The Illustrated Man on television when I was perhaps ten, and it scared the living daylights out of me. It wasn't that it was overtly a horror film, only that the resonant images -- from Steiger's illustrated body to the world of never ending rain; to the specter of parents murdering their own children to spare them a holocaust that never arrives -- were disturbing enough to haunt my young nightmares. I hadn't seen the film in probably twenty-five years so I thought this was the time to see if the movie actually lived up to my memory or if it was merely one of those phantasms that only childhood and impressionable youth can explain.

The answer is that, in a way, the film does live up to my expectations and memories. Smight's effort remains unsettling, provocative, vulgar and, indeed, raises many more questions than it answers. Although there are few actors I would less like to to see nude than Rod Steiger, The Illustrated Man nonetheless remains a potent vision of 20th century turmoil. In essence, the anthology is a cautionary tale of the year 1969. Which puts the film at the height of the Vietnam War, on the cusp of a decade wherein such concepts as violence on television and reproductive rights (Roe v. Wade) would dominate the culture wars. You can see all those ideas and issues bubbling just beneath the surface of this film.

What I believe is at work here is an intense fear of a future where mankind has succumbed to a number of contemporary evils. There's Orwellian bureaucracy and inhuman, subversive technology ("The Veldt"), perpetual war and war-making ("The Long Rain") and even faith-based thinking ("The Last Night of the World") as the particular boogeymen. It is impossible not to note that the framing story of The Illustrated Man occurs in nature - in wild, untamed country (by lakeside), while all the stories themselves are set in nightmarish apocalyptic futures: worlds of technological "playrooms," "sun domes" and the like. A contrast is being made here. Even the era of The Great Depression (the 1930s), the film seems to suggest, will look like child's play (literally) next to the future of "The Veldt" or the other stories.

The first vignette, "The Veldt" is very forward-thining, even today. It is concerned, nay obsessed, about globalization and the impact it could have on the economy. Steiger's character obsesses on a world where "everything is done for us," a minimalist, plastic, heartless world of ivory sterility, where labor laws dictate that people can only work six months out of the year. Steiger experiences sexual difficulties with his wife in this particular world; another side-effect of a dehumanized future, no doubt: impotence. Here, children are also cruel little bastards: raised by government therapists and machine nurseries. They kill their parents without a second thought. Trust your children to the State (and to the TV...), "The Veldt" suggests, and parents risk the future and survival.

"The Long Rain" is another commentary on an amoral future. Here -- in the distant future and on another planet -- man continues his warlike legacy. The commander of the spaceship (Steiger) is so ruthless with his men that when one disobeys his orders, Steiger shoots him in the back and kills him. Later, Carl attempts to keep in line his surviving subordinate by tantalizing him with the promise that there are "whores" at the Sun Domes. The subordinate (Drivas) is angry at this enticement to stay in the military; to remain obedient; to stay under the thumb of a cruel captain. "What if a man doesn't want a whore?" he replies. Instead, this character opts out of a system devoted to perpetual war and chooses suicide instead. With its alien jungle setting, perpetual rain, discussion of murdering a superior (or "fragging" in the vernacular of the time), it is clear that "The Long Rain" is a Vietnam War metaphor.

The film's final story, "The Last Night of the World" offers some real sociological red meat too. Again, set in the distant future (after an apocalyptic gas cloud destroys most of the population...), this tale warns about what could happen when a ruling class (consisting entirely of men, by the way) experiences delusions of grandeur: selecting a course for the entire human race based on its own delusional visions of God and the future. This story comments on sexism (the men are blithering idiots ready to murder their children and consequently the future while the woman featured here is entirely more sensible). "The Last Night of the World" also touches on ideas like group-think, religious domination and even cultism. We mustn't forget that 1969 was also the year of the Manson murders.

In The Illustrated Man, the future is a dark, dark place. Nature is either destructive ("The Long Rain"), a technological recreation tilted toward murder ("The Veldt") or a backdrop for human-forged horrors ("The Last Night of the World"). It is interesting that at the conclusion of each story (upon return to the lake), Smight dissolves to a particular shot: that of a burning campfire (often seen in close-up). The views of this fire are like a visual suggestion that each future tale ends in conflagration, destruction and chaos. The film also features a preponderance of low-angle shots, especially in relation to Bloom, to suggest her fearsome, otherworldly quality.

Digging deep now, I see The Illustrated Man as a story of a woman who -- by some means unknown to us -- has seen the horrors of the future and goes back in time to warn mankind to change his ways before it is too late. The only way she can do so, perhaps, is through the art of the living skin illustrations she imprints on Carl. I suggest that this "art" is actually the technology of her world and time, and -- like the technology we see deployed in the remainder of the film -- can lead only to destruction and pain because it is misused and misunderstood. A fact which makes Felicia - our prophet of bad times to come - a tragic figure in the classical sense. She has gone back in time to save the future, but her own technology, the creative medium she utilizes to change the future, is not understood and only leads to further destruction, anarchy and murder. Felicia's wistful voice over narration, about each person trying to see beyond his time, "facing questions with no answers" may represent her final realization that man will always be man, even if warned. He will not change. Carl is not able to understand the nature of the illustrations and indeed, grows murderous over them. She calls the illustrations a gift, but for him they are always a curse. This strikes me as being very clearly of-a-piece with such contemporary genre films as Planet of the Apes. The Illustrated Man is thus an end-of-the-world tale.

If you think of all the things that were happening in 1968 and 1969, you can understand more fully the power and depth of Smight's imagery; the notion that the future would be one of fires. The Tet Offensive, the Battle of Saigon, the My Lai Massacre, the Robert Kennedy Assassination, nerve gas leaks in Utah, Chappaquiddick, the Nixon Doctrine ("Vietnamization"), terrorist bombing in Quebec, the firebombing of Cambodia, student demonstrations at Harvard, the Stonewall Riots and on and on. All this was going on concurrently with the film, and you can practically sense the unease about the future oozing from the screen. I believe it no accident either that the film is basically framed as a conflict between generations. Willie is a young man full of optimism; Carl an old man filled with cynicism, murderous impulses and hatred. It's a tale of the generation gap, and Willie is so tortured by the world he views through Carl's eyes (or through his tattoos), that he too becomes murderous. The cycle of violence, in the end, gets handed from one generation to the next.

The cyclical nature of human life (of human violence, actually) is visually represented in The Illustrated Man by the fact that the same three actors portray different roles in different time periods. This conceit makes us understand how history repeats itself, again and again, across time. The story of Carl and of Man repeats across the breadth of the future; intertwined with the story of Felicia and Woman, and the story of Willie and Youth.

Make no mistake, this version of The Illustrated Man is not a Ray Bradbury film per se. Much of the writer's trademark lyricism and romanticism is missing, if not entirely absent. This is a Jack Smight film, a Howard N. Kreitsek interpretation from the late sixties. It is a brutal rendering of Bradbury's work that speaks directly to a certain place and time (and a certain set of fears). I would never use the adjectives "grotesque" or "vulgar" to describe Bradbury's writing, but those are indeed critical adjectives in any accurate description of this film. Steiger plays an absolute brute in The Illustrated Man, one who abuses small animals, is obsessed with sex, and is consumed with hatred. Along with the character of young Willie, we want to murder this arrogant, monstrous man. We want to murder him for touching and destroying the beauty of Felicia. We want to murder him for revealing a world of such endless ugliness and pain. I would argue, however, that these feelings -- while undeniably far away from the vision of Bradbury -- are entirely appropriate to a world view where the idea "never trust anyone over thirty" carried such currency.

I suppose I should end this review with a notation that The Illustrated Man is being re-made right now for a 2010 release. I wonder if it will be a science fiction spectacle; an anthology more faithful to the work of Ray Bradbury, or another comment on this new, turbulent age? We shall see...