The Man Who Fell to Earth

The Stranger with a British passport who walks into a small Kentucky town one morning is stranger than you think. He is in fact hairless, oddly-eyed, without nipples, navel or genitalia, a ship-wrecked (and possibly android) survivor from another, dying, planet. And he is played, with a minimum of help from his friendly make-up department, by our own David Bowie. The Stranger having learned English by monitoring movies from Earth television (which he can absorb twelve at a time) takes the name of Thomas Newton and commandeers the services of a patents lawyer, Farnsworth, to whom he casually delivers a handful of blueprints sufficient to found a vast industrial empire. It gradually becomes clear that this has been created simply to build a spaceship with which to rescue the few survivors of his home planet. But alas for his schemes, things begin to go badly awry. The girl-chasing ex-chemistry professor, Nathan Bryce, who has become his closest associate, is increasingly obsessed by the need to discover the truth about Newton's origins and aims. the business establishment feels itself threatened, and eventually his inventions over-stimulate the economy. Betrayed by his associates, his empire toppled by business rivals, his private enterprise space project in ruins, he is kidnapped and handed over as a guinea-pig to a team of doctors determined to discover what exactly makes him tick. The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) is a fascinating, labyrinthine jigsaw of a movie in which references and influences have been detected ranging from the New Testament to Citizen Kane, from the science-fiction pulp magazines to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, and from the work of Jean Cocteau to that of Harold Robbins. Superbly photographed, bubbling over with ideas, with some of the most unusually explicit sexual sequences ever to pass censorship, it ranks as one of the most remarkable British productions of the decade and a landmark in the career of its distinguished director Nicolas Roeg, and of course of its star.