Den illustrerade mannen

Unlike some Oscar winners who used their ensuing prestige to earn big bucks in anonymous mega productions, Steiger used his in more experimental productions, though with varying results. The year is 1933. A young wanderer meets a tattooed man. The tattooes which cover his whole body - have each a story to tell. From the original eighteen ''tattooes'' of Ray Bradbury's sci-fi book, the film version of The Illustrated Man confines itself to three: The Savanna, The Man and The Last Evening of the World. You can see the stories in Jack Smight's remarkable adaptation from 1969. That Hollywood produced films like Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy suggests a new era of more or less anarchistic variation. A time of experimentation always includes shots in the dark which do not always hit their target; though it can be interesting to view them today, in their context. Some have even got better with age. It took ten hours for make-up man Gordon Bau and his eight assistents to apply the tattooes to Steiger's upper body, and another working day for the lower.