1969: THE ILLUSTRATED MAN

What’s it about?

A young Depression-era drifter encounters an irascible stranger played by Rod Steiger. They share a pot of coffee (and a couple of creepy death threats) and soon Steiger reveals that he’s covered in magical tattoos that come to life if they are stared at too long. They were put there by a mysterious woman who Steiger is now tramping in search of, and when he finds her, he’ll kill her.

Somehow not frightened off by this weird and threatening story, the young drifter hangs out a bit longer with the illustrated man. Over the course of a day, he sees three futuristic stories play out in the living tattoos. First, two concerned parents are worried when their children’s holographic playroom seems stuck on the same death-obsessed scene of African lions. Next, the survivors of a rocket crash make their way to shelter across the eternally rain-covered surface of Venus. And finally, two more parents are faced with a horrible choice when they learn the world is to end that night and they are expected to put their children out of their misery ahead of time.




Is it any good?

I didn’t really expect a whole lot from this movie for a number of reasons. Mostly, I think I was prejudiced because it’s an adaption of a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. And much as I have enjoyed Bradbury’s stories (he was my favorite writer for years), there don’t seem to be a lot of high-quality adaptations of his books for some reason. Furthermore, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN isn’t a novel -- it’s a book of short stories with a very thin framing story about a tattooed man. So I knew this was going to be an anthology movie, and that usually isn’t a good sign.

But, as I have been learning time and time again during this project, lowered expectations are the greatest gift you can give to a lot of semi-obscure sci-fi flicks. It’s been years since I’ve read the book, so I don’t remember exactly how much frame story Bradbury lays out, but I don’t think it’s very much. I do remember that he pretty quickly abandons it after he sets up the premise. After a couple stories, there aren’t any more hobo interludes at all until the very end of the book.

The movie version, on the other hand, spends a lot of time on the frame story -- which I think was probably a good idea. Not only is there a lot of interaction between the two drifters (mostly Steiger being menacing or grumpy), but there are a couple flashback scenes that explain how Steiger got the tattoos in the first place. These parts of the movie feel a lot like a modern play, since there’s not much going on except two guys sitting around talking dramatically. I guess if you’re a big fan of naturalism in movies, it might put you off. But I usually kind dig that sort of stagey, stylistic approach (at least for a little while) since it usually means that the movie thinks it’s going to say something deep and eggheaded.



The three vignettes are also shorter and simpler than I thought they would be. The first two I remember very clearly as Bradbury’s stories, and I’m pretty sure the movie vignettes are more or less straight transcriptions of the plots, characters, and a lot of the dialogue. (I don’t remember the third one at all, but I have no reason to believe it’s any different.) A lot of Bradbury’s stories are kind of like campfire stories already -- very straightforward with nasty twists at the end -- so it’s pretty refreshing to see them up on screen without much embellishment. I think that’s part of the reason why this movie works for me -- the focus is more on beefing up the frame story than on trying to mess with the stories or to interlock them somehow. The vignettes are also far too short to get boring, and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN doesn’t even exactly feel like an anthology movie as a consequence.

Another thing that helps is that many of the same actors appear in all of the vignettes -- Steiger, the other drifter, and Claire Bloom play the main characters in all three of them. I don’t really know that there’s too much to be gotten out of this -- it’s not like the stories illuminate the characters in the frame story very much. But it does make the movie feel more cohesive, and is almost a Treehouse of Horror approach to the stories.




It’s not really clear whether the illustrated man is actually the victim of supernatural shenanigans as he claims, or if the young drifter is just impressionable enough that he imagines the pictures coming to life. Steiger seems to believe that the woman who illustrated him was from the distant future, which is how she was able to illustrate events that haven’t come to pass yet. (There’s also a blank spot on Steiger’s shoulder which he says will show folks how they will die if they stare into it.) But the real sci-fi parts of the movie are in the three vignettes. Bradbury once estimated that only a third of his stories are science fiction (another third being fantasy, and another third being neither), but all three of the vignettes here are set in sci-fi futures.

I don’t think I’m going to talk too much about the plots of the stories -- there’s not much point since they don’t really have a lot of bearing on the movie itself. But I will say they are pretty neat little stories. I liked the first two the best -- the Venus one is especially good in terms of sets and atmosphere. The first one has a pretty neat futuristic house too, but it’s one of those sterile and uncomfortable ones that nobody would actually want to live in. None of the vignettes have much character development and none of them are particularly satisfying on their own -- they’re too short for anything like that. But they are fine diversions as long as you are willing to float along with the movie.




The very ending of THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is perhaps inevitably where things start to get weird. First, there’s a long flashback of a very naked and very illustrated Rod Steiger wandering through an empty house as he looks for Claire Bloom, who has disappeared after putting the final tattoo on his body. Then the young drifter looks into the blank patch on the illustrated man’s back (I remember this happens in the book too) and sees an image of himself being throttled by the illustrated man. This leads directly to some struggling, some running, and an ambiguous ending. Steiger had been pretty creepy all along, so had he always planned to kill the young man? Or did knowledge of the future paradoxically precipitate a crisis that would otherwise have been avoided? Honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth trying to figure out the answer. I obviously enjoyed THE ILLUSTRATED MAN quite a bit -- more than I expected too, anyway -- but it’s more of a pleasure of the moment than the kind of thing you want to ponder after its done.

What else happened this year?

-- A journey to a newly discovered planet sharing Earth’s orbit (but on the exact opposite side of the sun) has an unexpected conclusion in DOPPELGÄNGER.
-- A couple of young Italians disagree over whether they ought to repopulate the world after a disaster in THE SEED OF MAN.
-- Ray Harryhausen just about perfects his dinosaur animations in the western THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, which results in amazing and unforgettable images like cowboys lassoing and bringing down an angry T-rex.
-- John Sturges directed MAROONED, in which three Apollo astronauts (played by Gene Hackman, Richard Crenna, and James Fransiscus) are marooned in orbit due to a technical fault. On the ground, NASA director Gregory Peck is forced to launch a dangerous rescue mission using an experimental spacecraft if they’re to be saved before they run out of oxygen.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1969...

Check out THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI unless you’re sick of me recommending things based on Harryhausen special effects. In that case, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is worth a look.

BONUS BLOG -- 1968: CHARLY

What’s it about?

Cliff Robertson plays Charly, a mentally challenged adult who spends his days sweeping up at a Boston bakery and his evenings fruitlessly trying to improve his reading and writing at night school. His teacher (played by Claire Bloom) suggests him as a candidate for an experimental surgery that has a chance of improving his intelligence.

Following the surgery, Charly at first doesn’t seems no different. But gradually his personality begins to change, and soon he’s performing better on aptitude tests as well. In only a few weeks, Charly outstrips his teacher and reaches genius levels of intelligence. But just as he seems to be adapting emotionally to his new condition, evidence suggests that the changes are only temporary.




Is it any good?

I thought I’d finished with 1968 a couple weeks ago, but then I went and watched CHARLY. I’d seen it before -- or at least most of it -- ages ago, and I’ve read FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (the Daniel Keyes novel it’s based on) at least twice. So I didn’t expect there to be many surprises, and for the first half of the movie there weren’t any.

I’ve always thought that the idea behind FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON is better than the book itself. For one thing, the story is pretty predictable once the trajectory is established. For another, it’s written as a first-person diary kept by Charly Gordon and the intentional misspellings and mistakes in the “dumb” chapters are pretty distracting to me. On the other hand, it’s a very memorable story and it raises a lot of interesting questions.




The first half of the movie is about what I expected (and faintly remembered). Charly goes about his daily life working at the bakery, going to night school, and riding on tour buses on his day off. He clearly misses a lot of what’s going on around him, and the guys at the bakery especially play some mean tricks on him. But he’s also functional enough to hold down a menial job and live in his own tiny apartment. The transition from dumb Charly to smart Charly happens pretty swiftly once it gets going -- there aren’t many intermediate stages between “mentally challenged” and “genius”. But there is one pretty great scene where the doctors are testing Charly after the procedure and there’s no noticeable improvement in his aptitude. But as Charly reacts in frustration to his failures, it’s suddenly clear that he’s already a different person with a different level of self-awareness. It’s a pretty subtle point that plays out in a neat way -- and shortly after that, Charly is confidently solving problems that would stump the average adult.

So far, so good. But about halfway through the movie, the story jumps violently off the tracks and never gets entirely back on again. It’s no surprise that as Charly grows more self-aware, he starts to notice that his night teacher is a very pretty lady. Soon, he’s head over heels in love with her, and shows up late one night at her apartment. There’s a very uncomfortable scene where he tries to kiss her, and she reacts very badly -- pushing him away and literally screaming that nobody would ever want him. Charly storms off into a psychedelic split-screen montage in which he apparently grows a beard, becomes a biker, and lives a wild rock ‘n’ life for a couple of weeks.

Here’s the montage:



Seeing it out of context, it’s hard to explain just how jarring and inexplicable it is. This is the first of a long series of what I believe are technically termed “weirdo expressionistic freak outs” in the second half of the movie. This particular one is a complete departure from everything -- we have never seen those bikers or dancers before and we never see them again. And except for this single minute and a half sequence, there is practically no reference ever made to Charly’s rumschpringa again. When he comes back, he’s cleanshaven, sober, serious-minded, and doesn’t seem inclined to talk about his experience at all. (When the teacher asks him what he learned, he says simply, “I’m back.”)

I should mention that this montage is neither the first nor last time that split screens are used in the movie, but it’s certainly the most dramatic. Up until this point, they are used mostly to show the faces of two different characters who are talking to one another at the same time. So in the earlier instances the split-screen feels almost anthropological -- like a scientific observation of human interaction. But this montage is clearly supposed to be some kind of psychotic, emotionally fractured breakdown.

Directly following this sequence, Charly and the teacher do end up romantically involved. Though this interlude isn’t what I would ordinarily call a “freak out”, it is certainly expressionistic. It’s all sun-dappled forests and glittering golden ponds, sensuous stretching and sweet murmured nothings. This is followed by a sequence where Charly is presented at a scientific conference. The psychologists and doctors begin to question him, and he has a kind of civilized freak out where he starts spouting cynical philosophical pronouncements.

Here’s the question segment (sorry for the aspect ratio):



The moment in that conference where Charly confronts the scientists with the knowledge that he will soon start losing his intelligence is the first time that this possibility is mentioned in the movie. Up until that point, it’s always been assumed that the intelligence boost is permanent. So immediately following this, there is the final expressionistic freak out, in which Charly is literally haunted by the specter of his former self. This is probably my least favorite part of the movie, since the “dumb” Charly looks so sinister and threatening. Of course, that makes sense -- Charly is afraid of losing his intelligence, so naturally he’ll imagine his old self as something to be feared. But it also turns the old “dumb” Charly (who was a very likeable character at the start of the movie) into a sneaking caricature. And since we don’t really get to spend any time with Charly after his intelligence is all gone again, these are practically the last images we see of what he will become. And it’s a much more depressing and frightening picture than what is shown at the beginning of the movie.

Anyway, here’s the final sequence:



Now, if you’re like me, then you couldn’t stop yourself from laughing by the very end of that clip. (Actually, if you’re like me, you were laughing back in the first montage sequence.) A lot of the last half of the movie dances right on the line between “earnestly artistic” and “unintentionally hilarious”. Times may have been different back in 1968, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that people were so different forty years ago that nobody thought of laughing during these scenes. A lot of humor comes from the unexpected -- and each of these freak outs is certainly unexpected -- and it would take a person of amazing skill to keep the sequences unpredictable but keep them from being funny. In any event, they definitely make for a unique ending to the movie. As I said, I’ve often thought the book is too predictable towards the end, and at least CHARLY does not make those same mistakes. I don’t think it accomplishes 100% of what it sets out to do, but when you start trying weirdo tactics you aren’t necessarily going to get predictable results.