Review of The Illustrated Man

The Illustrated Man is now on DVD - it's a reasonably okay transfer (the color is a little off, but not much), but as always people who "review" these things on the IMDb trumpet "misunderstood masterpiece" so often it's laughable. No, this film, which was a critical and box-office disaster, has not become a masterpiece in the intervening years - it's the same bad film it always was. Anyone who says (condescendingly, I might add) "It's for thinkers" clearly knows little about Mr. Bradbury, cinema, or thinking. The film has no sense of rhythm or pace, and it just sits there like a dead herring. Mr. Steiger is fine, so is Claire Bloom and Robert Drivas, but the script is bad, and the normally reliable Jack Smight seems hamstrung by the material.