The Man Who Fell to Earth

Year:  1976

Director:  Nicolas Roeg

Screenplay:  Paul Mayersberg, based on the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis

Starring:  David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, Buck Henry, Bernie Casey

Running Time:  139 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction

A strange man, Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie), stumbles into a small New Mexico town.  Within a few years he is the multi-millionaire head of World Enterprises Corporation, a company which sells innovative technological products.  However, Thomas Newton is not what he appears.  In reality he is a humanoid alien sent to Earth from a dying planet to bring back much-needed water supplies for his homeworld.  He has been using his advanced alien technology in his company's products, and plans to use the money that he is making to finance the construction of a spaceship to ship the water to his planet.  However, during his time on earth he begins to fall victim to human vices such as alcohol, sex, television and corporate greed.

This film was David Bowie's first leading role, and at the time he was at the height of his "Thin White Duke" phase.  He gives an astonishing performance, and is utterly convincing as an alien, according to Bowie he was in such a fragile state at the time that didn't need to act in the role at all, he just learned his lines for the day and acted naturally.  Rip Torn plays a creepy professor who finds the mystery of Newton and his corporation even more interesting than chasing after his female students; Buck Henry plays a patent lawyer who becomes Newton's confidante and right hand man; and Bernie Casey plays the ruthless owner of a rival company.  They all give good performances, but Candy Clark is very good as the naive hotel chambermaid who falls in love with Newton and both becoming the other's nemesis.  Based on the novel by American author Walter Tevis (who also wrote The Hustler and it's sequel The Color of Money which were both made into successful films, and The Queen's Gambit which became a miniseries on Netflix), the film was directed by British director Nicolas Roeg, who was coming off the success of the horror film Don't Look Now (1973).  Roeg was known for his innovative style, combining surreal, poetic imagery with a jagged stream-of-consciousness style of editing.  Despite a fairly conventional alien innocent on Earth storyline, The Man Who Fell to Earth is a very unconventional science-fiction film.  For one thing, there is very little traditional science-fiction imagery in the film, aside from several brief sequences where Newton remembers his homeworld.  Despite being set entirely in America, it is a British film made with an almost entirely British crew, which may help explain how the film makes America look like the alien planet, it's one of the great outsider's views of America.  The film is long, slow, and the style makes it at times difficult to follow, but it is mesmerising.  At times it is funny and it is powerful, while the technology and values on display (such as Rip Torn's professor sleeping around with students) date the film as a product of the seventies, it is still a pertinent comment on the modern world, which may be more pertinent now than in 1976.  The film is visually striking, powerful and memorable, and remains one of the highpoint of David Bowie's career and of 1970s science-fiction cinema.

David Bowie is The Man Who Fell to Earth
 

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Year of Release:  1976
Director:   Nicolas Roeg
Screenplay:  Paul Mayersberg, based on the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
Starring:  David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, Buck Henry, Bernie Casey
Running Time:  138 minutes
Genre:  science-fiction, satire

A mysterious man, Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie), comes out of nowhere an sets up a hugely successful electronics conglomerate, World Enterprises, using revolutionary technology.  In reality, Newton is a humanoid alien in disguise, who plans to use the profits he earns through his company, which he has set up with patents on his advanced alien technology, and the inventions he has developed with it, to construct a huge spaceship to ship water back to his home planet which is dying due to severe drought.  Newton does indeed become fabulously wealthy, however he soon becomes corrupted by human vices such as alcohol, television, sex and money.

This fascinating film is a science-fiction movie like no other.  It's long, frustrating, fascinating, beguiling, pretentious, funny, dark and wonderful  by turns.  It also works as a satire on modern American life.  The imagery, which is heavy on symbolism, is largely taken from outside the science-fiction genre.  This was David Bowie's debut feature film and it is the role he was born to play.  With his quiet performance as the pale, emaciated alien everything about him is otherworldly, even before he reveals his true appearance (hairless, with yellow cat's-eyes and no genitals).  Candy Clark also impresses as sweet, lonely hotel maid Mary-Lou, who falls for Newton.  As with many Nicolas Roeg films, this is full of rich, striking often surreal images and a barrage of cinematic tricks, although it's a lot more linear than many of his other works of the period.  The several brief flashback scenes to Newton's homeworld are the most traditionally science-fiction elements of the film, and create the sense of a genuinely alien world with very few props and effects.
It is also a scathing satire on human weakness, corruption and cruelty, as the delicate alien embraces and becomes victimised by the darker side of human nature.  This is a film that would probably never get made now, it's too slow, too cerebral, too allegorical, too dark, too sexual and too obscure for modern day Hollywood science-fiction.

You may not enjoy this film, but you should certainly see it, at least once.

   David Bowie is The Man Who Fell to Earth