The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Exaggerated performances, dodgy visuals and an incomprehensible story. This, however, cultivated a rather cracking experience.

This is a film for the experienced cinephile. An average audience will probably get bored. David Bowie is an alien who lands on earth in search of water. This was the legendary singer's first starring role and he more than owns the role of a strange human trying to mix with humans. The surreal imagery by noted director Nicholas Roeg is a highlight and although the film wasn't a big hit either critically or commercially back when it was released, it has a huge following today. If you are a fan of science fiction you should check this out.

I have recently seen the director's cut of this film on a large screen in a private cinema in London. It has never been released to the public and it contains 20 minutes of footage which was cut from the released version. It thus runs for two hours and 19 minutes instead of one hour and 59 minutes. The extra footage largely consists of raunchy and highly explicit sex scenes where the actors are mostly completely naked. For those many people I have known over the years who told me they wondered whether David Bowie might perhaps have been so androgynous that he lacked the necessary masculine equipment, I can now give assurance that he did indeed have a male member, having seen the proof up there on the screen. So at least that mystery is now solved. (None of the sex scenes was really necessary, and they all appear to have been a personal indulgence of the director.) This film, or at least the publicly released version of it, is now being seen again far and wide, as we look back in retrospect at the extraordinary phenomenon which was David Bowie. I am reliably assured that the film was screened last month in Greece at the Naxos Film Club, and as the expatriates in Naxos are so near unto Olympus, Zeus shall doubtless shortly be making his arrangements to elevate Bowie to the status of 'Hero', compete with his own cult (which in any case already exists). Another point to make is that this film would never have been made without the determined efforts of David Cammell. He is credited only with 'initial development' but he persuaded Nick Roeg to direct the film and he and Nick jointly chose David Bowie for the lead, which frankly 'made' the film. Cammell should really have had a co-producer credit, but that's the film business for you. (Moral: don't always believe screen credits.) As for Bowie, he was always obsessed with black magic, Aleister Crowley, and a superficial and distorted form of Kabbalah. He was no occult scholar, but he was an excellent occult poseur. In 1972, four years before this film was released, Bowie invented and 'became' the persona Ziggy Stardust, who was essentially an androgynous extraterrestrial who fell to Earth. So I am wondering about the true genesis of this film's concept, frankly. In 1969 my wife and I attended a Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium in which Bowie appeared. After boring us with a song about a young man accused of crime, Bowie then marshalled full-screen NASA special effects of a space capsule behind him and electrified us all with his song 'Major Tom'. The song was released a few days before an Apollo mission reached the Moon, so Bowie had judged the Zeitgeist perfectly. The performance was very upbeat and optimistic and became part of the hope that we all had back then of humanity's future in space. However, in later years, Bowie descended into a gloom and pessimism which would last the rest of his life, and his heavy cocaine addiction in the 1970s certainly did not help his mental state. Whatever one thinks one him, and I am not an admirer of his, one has to admit that he was extremely talented and imaginative, and of course he was a genuine 'weirdo', unlike anyone else. If being uniquely strange is an achievement, then he succeeded in that. I do not generally approve of the narcissistic pop stars who sweep silly people up into the vortices of their self-love like dust sucked into a tornado. I was horrified at the mass-glorification of Bowie by the media at his death. Even the quality newspapers carried pages and pages of adulation about him, as if the monarch had died or a god had returned to heaven. It made me utterly disgusted. Have we sunk so low that we are required to worship mere singers? I suppose it was just another manifestation of what had earlier come out as Elvis-mania, succeeded by Beatle-mania, Rolling Stones mania, and then all the other pop manias which shrieking 14 year-old girls propagate like waves through society. And that is clearly how shallow we are now. Now as to the film itself. Although the film is 'very seventies', there is nothing wrong in that. That's called patina. In my opinion, the film is amazingly brilliant. It is an example of Nick Roeg gone to the limit, and then some. David Bowie is completely convincing as the lone extraterrestrial who has 'fallen to earth' from another world, perhaps because he really believed it. In the story he has left behind his wife and children in a world dying of drought. We see them looking weird and wan in a dry and desolate desert far away in space. Eventually, they lie dead in the sand. He cannot return to them. Candy Clark is brilliant as a simple-minded hotel worker who becomes Bowie's mistress, and her performance is spectacular, ranging as if does over many years and many personality and mood changes. An unscrupulous rogue of an associate of Bowie's in business is well played by Rip Torn. Both Clark and Torn were perfectly cast. Bowie introduces extraterrestrial technology into Earth industry and becomes immensely rich, though he achieves no happiness. This theme played to the widespread rumours in the 1970s that extraterrestrial technology reverse-engineered from crashed UFOs (such as those claimed at Roswell) had been fed into the American military-industrial complex, resulting decades later in such things as military drones and stealth aircraft. In the film, we see this kind of injected extraterrestrial technology acted out on the screen in a casual and matter-of-fact manner by the world-weary and by now decadent Bowie, who like an Amazonian tribesman has no tolerance of alcohol, and is encouraged by his unscrupulous business associates to take up regular heavy drinking.

How you feel about this movie depends on what you want out of it. I have two disclosures to make: first, I write reviews short and sweet, with the intention of countering those people who give mediocre films 9 stars out of ten because a film speaks to them in some way that it will not speak to others. Second, I am a die-hard Bowiephile.I watched this movie over and over and over again, for the sheer love of David Bowie. That said, I don't think this is a great film. In a few ways, its terrible. Most significantly, the screenplay and direction don't match well enough to make a very coherent or intelligible movie. It feels cheap and disjointed. If you haven't read the book, it will not make much of sense. As for performances, they are hit and miss. Bowie, many say, was exactly in his element doing this film in 75/76 when he was truly an alien living in L.A, wacked out on cocaine and out of touch with real life. How much he really acted was debatable-but if you like Bowie, seeing this film is a must. There are a few great visuals, including the cover shot used for the album LOW. This movie would have been better with a different director in my opinion, but it is what it is. A snapshot in time