1976: THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

What’s it about?

Space alien David Bowie lands on Earth, files for nine lucrative patents, and becomes impossibly wealthy. His company, World Enterprises, makes futuristic consumer gadgets like self-developing film and metal balls that play music. But one day while traveling incognito, he faints on an elevator and ends up in a relationship with a hotel maid.

Meanwhile, college professor Rip Torn comes to work for World Enterprises on its new private space program. He begins to suspect that Bowie is not quite what he appears to be, and uses a hidden X-ray camera to determine that he’s not human. But just as Bowie is about to fly back to his family in outer space, the government starts hounding him for being too successful.




Is it any good?

I haven’t really decided whether I like David Bowie as an actor or not. He seems like the kind of guy you hire not so much for what he can do, but for who he is. (Kind of like Andre the Giant or Jenny McCarthy.) I don’t think he necessarily does a bad job as the alien visitor in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, but it seems pretty obvious that he was picked for the role at least partly because he’s a weird guy who had pretended to be an alien before in his albums and live performances. I can’t deny that David Bowie is a massively talented songwriter and musician -- but, look, there was a guy at my high school who told everybody for a year that he was a vampire, but that still doesn’t make him the right guy to play Dracula.

Then again, David Bowie is not really a problem in this movie. I can’t help wonder if another actor might have been better, but the alien we get is serviceable enough. The bigger problem is that so much of the movie is impossible to understand -- at least the first time through, but some of it is still obscure after more than one viewing. So much information is withheld for so long that a lot of interesting things just go by unnoticed.

The movie starts with Bowie’s arrival on Earth -- except we don’t see his spaceship or much of anything that suggests he’s any different from any drifter. He just starts out walking down a hill with no explanation of who he is, where he has come from, or why he is on Earth. And it’s quite a while into the movie before any of those questions are answered -- and one of the crucial ones (why he is there) never is at all.




I read the Walter Tevis novel that this movie is based on a couple of years ago, so I knew generally what to expect. I already knew, for instance, that when Bowie walks to a little town and sells a ring to a jeweler for twenty bucks that he is taking the first tiny step towards building up the seed money that he will use to found his corporate empire. But in the movie, there is no apparent reason for why we are watching such incredibly mundane things, and frankly the whole beginning is pretty boring as a result. The book, I should say, is not much better at this point at giving explanations. But at least there is some mystery about who the visitor is, and there is an awareness that he is somehow fundamentally different from everybody else. But since there’s no voiceover narration in the movie, we only get hints about that.

The same kind of problem persists throughout the movie. Characters are introduced (like Rip Torn’s college professor) with no indication of how they will fit into the story, so everything they do at first just seems meaningless. Once you know who they are and what role they play, it’s clear that there were key little details even in those early scenes that were providing information, but there was just not enough context to understand it. I’m sure that THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a much better movie the second time you see it -- or perhaps even the third or fourth. But there are parts that I’m not sure I would ever understand.

For instance, the government’s interest in Bowie is inexplicable. (At least, I think those characters represent the government. I can’t remember if they ever say who they are or not. If not, I suppose they might represent some competing business interest.) A couple of shady guys talk about how Bowie’s corporation is too innovative. Then they kidnap Bowie one hour before his spaceship is about to take off, throw some of his associates out of a high rise window, and lock Bowie up in a hotel where they perform medical tests on him. Why? Do they suspect he’s an alien? Do they just think his company is too successful? I don’t know.

And about that spaceship. In the novel, it’s explained clearly that the visitor was sent from his planet to Earth using the very last scraps of available fuel. The planet is dying and the inhabitants are completely out of energy and almost out of water. The visitor’s mission is to build up wealth on Earth (which they have learned about from television broadcasts), construct a spaceship, and return to his home planet with the means of salvation or escape. The visitor is on Earth in a last-ditch effort to save his race -- and that makes every moment of delay a matter of life and death.




None of this is explained in the movie, except for vague references to a “drought” on Bowie’s home planet and some brief shots of his family apparently dying. We know that Bowie is trying to get back to his planet, but so many key details are missing that it doesn’t seem to mean anything. Just following the movie itself, I would have guessed that Bowie is only trying to get back to his family -- presumably to die with them. Which of course raises the question of why he ever left in the first place.

As I said before, there are lots of neat things throughout the movie, but they are so subtle that they mostly just slip right by unnoticed. For instance, Bowie hires an actor who looks exactly like himself to play the father figure in his company’s commercials. The reason for this is that his wife watches the broadcasts on her planet, so she is able to see her husband in the commercials. We actually see this happen once, but at the time it just flew right over my head and I didn’t realize what the scene was supposed to be showing until I was skimming through the movie again to grab screenshots. There are also some just plain weird things that happen that are never explained either. At one point, a car that Bowie is riding in seems to travel back in time. Or, at least, he looks out the window and sees some folks from pioneer days and the folks from pioneer days look back in amazement at the car. But nobody else in the car is aware of it. What does it mean? Why does it happen? I have no idea. (Also, it’s just kind of dumb.)

The guy who directed this movie is Nicholas Roeg. He’s probably most famous for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH and the artsy quasi-horror flick DON’T LOOK NOW (1973). (People of a certain age may also know him -- and possibly fear him -- from his 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s THE WITCHES.) I didn’t really enjoy DON’T LOOK NOW all that much either when I saw it a few years ago. I don’t remember exactly what I didn’t like, but I think I had similar problems as the ones I have with THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH -- it’s just unnecessarily confusing and weird, boring in parts, emotionally distant, and occasionally ridiculous. I eventually read the Daphne du Maurier story that DON’T LOOK NOW is based on, and I enjoyed the written version pretty well. So I guess my advice is that if you are going to watch a Nicholas Roeg movie from the 1970s, read whatever it’s based on first and then just prepared to be kind of disappointed anyway. Then maybe try watching it a second time a few days later to see if you like it any better.




What else happened in 1976?

-- A man turns fugitive on his birthday to escape death in a society that kills anyone over thirty in the stone cold classic LOGAN'S RUN.
-- The East Germans return with another tale of communists in space in THE DUST OF THE STARS.
-- Yul Brynner also returns for a cameo in WESTWORLD's lesser known sequel, FUTUREWORLD.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1976...

In my opinion, LOGAN'S RUN is the only one from this year that's better than average. But it's also my opinion that it's one of the greatest science fiction flicks ever made.