It's got to be hard when you're an alien from another planet, right? Yet Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton tries his darndest to be manly...and fails. From the beginning of the 1976 movie, The Man Who Fell To Earth, he fails. He leaves his wife and young children on a planet that looks uninhabited and definitely uninhabitable without water or any signs of life. He plans to infiltrate Earth with his clever inventions, based on studying television signals from the planet, and form a company with a patents attorney that hires an engineer to help him save his planet. How? Good question. I'm not smart about physics, but it seems to involve transferring energy. Water. Enough to save a burned-up planet! My mind reels at the enormity of the problem. I can't fathom why he didn't bring them to Earth with him or build a bigger spaceship.

Newton next fails at his mission by being observed after crashing with a fantastic surge of water in a peaceful mountain lake. He sells his wedding ring (customs like Earth?) for twenty bucks, proceeds with forming his company and finding success, especially with a camera with self-developing film (but don't know what the other eight patents are), and becomes involved with a pretty hotel housekeeper who strangely thinks the pasty-white, stick-thin, flaming redheaded guy (who faints in the elevator and develops a nosebleed so she carries him like a baby to his bed) is cute.

He'll try to be manly then by saying little or ignoring her, by grabbing the TV remote for eight to twelve TVs for a microcosm of America's past and present, by having sex with her (full male and female nudity here and with his engineer's tryst with high school girls), by attending church with her and singing along, by drinking alcohol instead of water and finally by showing her how ugly he really is without the wig, eyebrows, blue eyes, nipples and genitalia.

Um, how can one be manly by showing that you have no balls? And, my gosh, how did he glue that stuff on to have sex? Sure looked real (and real little) to me!

His girlfriend's so hopeless that, after screaming and running from him, she attempts to accept him, but can't. Instead the engineer gets an earful that doesn't surprise him. What do you suppose he does with the news? We have heard his thoughts of gratitude for his boss, how his life changed and he no longer desires high school girls. He has considered Newton mysterious, certifiable and liable to run the company into the ground. Now knowing what he does, he'll do what he thinks is best. Is it manly? Well, action, violence, and personal satisfaction would indicate this!


Observations

David Bowie may have failed at making his character manly, but Newton was certainly intriguing with an other-worldly aura. Not only his frailty and androgynous look served him here, but also in the way he moved and acted as a visitor to Earth. It wasn't that he gawked or exclaimed over things; he saved that for his TVs. Rather he was quiet, trusting, without humor, reclusive and haunted by flashbacks of his last moments with his family. He professed to love them, yet I wasn't convinced. How could he have imagined they would survive for even a few years on such a dead planet?

Candy Clark (American Graffiti) played his neurotic girlfriend, Mary Lou, in an entertaining, go-for-broke kind of way (she whined "I want my Tommy" mixed with bawling for five minutes with cut ins of what was happening to her Tommy, which I won't divulge.). Rip Torn (Wonder Boys) tore through his basically predatory role of the engineer with some bite and Buck Henry (Grumpy Old Men) pulled off the role of Newton's attorney/manager of the company, World Enterprises, like a yes man expecting the worse in every situation. They supported Bowie's alien character courageously, not an easy thing to do, I'm sure.

The Man Who Fell To Earth was directed by Nicolas Roeg (Castaway) early in his career and one of his most memorable films today. Paul Mayersberg (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence which also starred Bowie) wrote the 138-minute script based on the Walter Tevis novel. The crisp cinematography used interesting angles, flashbacks and breakaways for a chaotic effect. Sometimes narration by a few characters steadied things, though, to help us know them better. The offbeat score included bluegrass, rhumba and champagne music, with Roy Orbison's "Blue Bayou" in the background while twelve TVs blared away and other selections by Bing Crosby, Jim Reeves and Louis Armstrong underscored the variety of sound in 5.1 mix and digitally enhanced.

No children should watch this, obviously. It's the type of movie us adults need to watch at least twice or three times to fully appreciate and since I only had time to watch it once with some rewinding, I know I'm not seeing all the wonders of the movie. It's science fiction that's believable, not gimmicky, for aliens could very well be among us right now, trying to make enough money to fund research into space travel. Maybe in government!

I just wish Newton had done the more loving thing by either dying with his family or found a way to bring them along to Earth. We wouldn't have needed this bizarre movie, I realize, but aliens just can't act manly.

This has been a contribution to the Manly Write-off, hosted by birthday and Epinions' anniversary celebrants Joubert and Hawgwyld. Hope I wasn't stretching the rules with this unmanly movie review, guys! Check out this webpage for links to all the participants' entries:

http://www.angelfire.com/mb2/mypageontheweb/page9.html).


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age