Typically, I don't write reviews but thought I would give it a shot. The prologue and epilogue are telling . . when the woman narrates at the beginning of the film "Each person who tries to see beyond his own time, must face questions to which there cannot yet be proved answers . . " and then changes it at the end of the film to "Each person who tries to see beyond his own time, must face questions to which there cannot yet be absolute answers . ." look closely there is a difference. My sense is Bradbury, at the time his book was written (early 1950's), was wrestling with his own answers to the basic question of "What is the meaning of life?" The subtle change between the beginning and ending means something . . .proven vs absolute . . . to me this was an author clearly struggling with this central question . . since he's 91, let's hope he has it figured out now . . . :)

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.

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.