Adapted from the Walter Tevis (The Hustler) novel of the same name, The Man Who Feel to Earth is a weird movie. David Bowie plays an alien from a dessert world come to Earth presumably in search of water, only he gets stranded. Though he has some advanced technical knowledge he is not a scientist, so he gets a gay patten lawyer (played by Buck Henry) to set up an ultimately very successful company for him exploiting the alien technology he does know, mostly improvements in things like cameras and something akin to a CD player. Bowie, whose character goes by the name of Thomas Jerome Newton and somehow sports a British passport, hopes to use his fortune to develop a new spacecraft (with the help of chemist Rip Torn) so he can get back to his wife and kids on his home planet.
The plot sounds like it could be interesting but its rather oddly done. The editing is odd, there are whole sequences where it looks like Newton is experiencing two realities at once, but that's never explained or really dealt with in the feature. In addition the sense of time is off, it flips forward a great deal, with some of the characters aging decades, but it always looks like the 1970's. Newton enters a long term relationship with a girl he meets at a New Mexico hotel (Candy Clark), where he relocates his company presumably because he likes the desert. Newton starts to give into our vices, especially alcohol and watching a lot of television, and a whole lot of shall we say 'intimacy' with Candy Clark, though I suppose you can say at least he does stay faithful to her (but what about his alien wife?). Ultimately there's this corporate/government cabal who thinks Newton's World Enterprises Incorporated may be overheating the economy do to its rapid output of new technologies, unable to get Bowie and Buck Henry to slow things down, they kill Henry and take Bowie prisoner for years.
This is really an odd movie, it brings to mind a number of out there, structurally or plot eccentric films of the 1970's like The Little Prince, Johnathan Livingston Seagull, and The Ruling Class. The film seems very much an influence on the directorial style and arguably themes of the work of Bowie's son Duncan Jones. Also it would be hard not to believe that the character Adrian Viedt from The Watchman was not based on Bowie's character. This is a weird film that runs from puzzlingly intriguing to tedious and never really seems to work. Grade: D
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Not that I know a lot about David Bowie, but....
The Feb 2 Rolling Stone magazine (is there anyone in that magazine under 50? asks my son) has an article on him:
"In 1971 he realized he could combine it all - music and theater - into one character: Ziggy Stardust, an otherworldly being who came to earth to save it....and whose aspiritions delivered him to ruin, his best purposes unfinished." Parts of that in "The Man Who Fell to Earth," wouldn't you say.
I saw the movie around the time of its release, and it is still memorable. One of these days I'll watch it again. Is it still what my mind's eye recalls it as?
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