Walking Nightmare

"Don't ever call them tattoos," warns an ex-carny roustabout (Rod Steiger) whose entire body is covered with pictures. "They're skin illustrations." The work of a sibyl (Claire Bloom) from some far distant future, the illustrations are animated auguries of tragic destiny.

Steiger is talking to a young hobo (Robert Drivas), and before the boy's astonished eyes, the skin pictures come alive and involve him in stories of the world's future and his own death.

The stories are adapted from a novel by Ray Bradbury, a sci-fi writer whose eerie fantasies are sometimes ill served by his earthbound prose. In them he predicts a time when children can conjure up a nightmare from their subconscious to kill their parents and anticipates the eventual psychological deterioration of space explorers and the sunset of the world. Screenwriter Howard B. Kreitsek substitutes a few ringers of his own ("There is a point at which fantasy becomes dangerously close to reality," Robert Drivas intones portentously). But responsibility for the failure of The Illustrated Man must rest with Director Jack Smight. He has committed every possible error of style and taste, including the inexcusable fault of letting Steiger chew up every piece of scenery in sight. Exhuming his Oscar-winning sorghum accent from In the Heat of the Night, he gets more syllables out of a conjunction than most other actors could from Hamlet's second soliloquy. Steiger's performance, which is well below his usual high standard, sadly lacks the quality of magic that separates simple fantasy from a waking nightmare.

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