|
THE ILLUSTRATED MAN opens. Directed by Jack Smight, from a screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek, based on three of the eighteen short stories featured in novelist Ray Bradbury’s same-titled 1951 anthology. Scenery chewing Rod Steiger stars as a belligerent drifter searching for the mysterious woman (Claire Bloom) responsible for covering his entire body with a series of kaleidoscopic tattoos which, under intense scrutiny, serve as a portal to a trio of self-contained stories set in a Twilight Zone-like dystopian past, present and future reality. A trippy, unremittingly grim sci-fi confection obscured by a patina of frustrating inscrutability.
