The Man Who Fell to Earth (film)
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| The Man Who Fell to Earth | |
|---|---|
 A French poster for the film |
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| Directed by | Nicolas Roeg |
| Produced by | Michael Deeley Barry Spikings |
| Written by | Walter Tevis (novel) Paul Mayersberg |
| Starring | David Bowie Rip Torn Candy Clark |
| Music by | John Phillips Stomu Yamashta |
| Cinematography | Anthony B. Richmond |
| Editing by | Graeme Clifford |
| Distributed by | British Lion Films (UK) Cinema 5 Distributing Columbia Pictures (USA) |
| Release date(s) | May 28 1976 (U.S. release) |
| Running time | 138 min |
| Language | English |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a 1976 science fiction film directed by Nicolas Roeg about an extraterrestrial who crash lands on Earth seeking a way to ship water to his planet, which is suffering from a severe drought. The film maintains a strong cult status for its strong use of surreal imagery and its performances by David Bowie in his first starring film role, Candy Clark, and Hollywood veteran Rip Torn. The film was based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis and was later remade as a less-successful 1987 television adaptation.
Contents |
[edit] Cast
- David Bowie - Thomas Jerome Newton
- Buck Henry - Oliver Farnsworth
- Rip Torn - Nathan Bryce
- Candy Clark - Mary-Lou
[edit] Plot
David Bowie plays Thomas Jerome Newton, a humanoid alien who comes to Earth from a distant planet seeking a way to ship back water to his home planet which is experiencing a terrible drought.
Newton uses the advanced technology of his home planet to patent many inventions on Earth, and rises to incredible wealth as the head of a technology-based conglomerate, World Enterprises Corporation, aided by leading patent attorney Oliver V. Farnsworth. Secretly, this wealth is needed to construct his own space vehicle program in order to ship water back to his home planet.
While in New Mexico, he meets Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), a cute but lonely, unloved and relatively uneducated girl working as an elevator operator in a hotel. Soon, a love affair begins between the two, and Mary-Lou introduces Newton to many customs of Earth culture; amongst them church-going, fashion, alcohol, and eventually humanoid sex. However, his appetite for alcohol and television become crippling, slowly souring his relationship. His secret identity as an alien is also discovered by his intensely curious fuel technician Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), one of Newton's few friends. He also reveals his true form as an alien to Mary-Lou, who is intensely shocked and unable to cope with his secret life.
Newton attempts to take the spaceship on its maiden voyage amongst a myriad of press exposure, but just before his scheduled take-off he is detained, apparently by the government, while operatives kill his key business partners including Farnsworth. The government, who has received the tip that he is an alien through Bryce, holds him captive in an luxury 'apartment' (constructed in an old warehouse) where they continuously send him through rigorous and inhumane tests, culminating in an X-ray of his eyes, which burns the contact lenses in his disguise onto his eyes permanently.
Towards the end of his captivity, he is visited again by Mary-Lou, now older and ugly, her once wholesomely pretty face and figure having been ravaged by the years, who, despite her now primarily sexual interests in Newton, ultimately realizes that the relationship between them has failed. When she leaves, Newton discovers that his 'prison' is unlocked and that the government evidently has no further interest in him, so he leaves.
Newton has ultimately failed in his mission to save his dying planet, ending up trapped on Earth; broken, lonely, and embittered. Without other options, he creates a recording with alien messages, which he hopes will be broadcast via radio to his home-planet to say goodbye. Nathan Bryce buys one of these recordings and decides to meet Newton, curious to know what was on the recording; Bryce is now showing signs of old age, but Newton is still young, however he is depressed, embittered, and drunken, trying with difficulty to remain stoic in the face of his defeat, no longer interested in trying to save his people.
[edit] Relationship with the novel
The film is significantly different from the novel in many repects and stands more as a work on its own than a direct interpretation. Several physical changes occur to the characters, most notably the appearance of Bowie's signature orange hair -- in the book, Newton is described as having curly white-blonde hair. Newton is also a much more stoic character in the film, who sheds no tears despite his aggravation, frustration and torment. In the film, just before he is released from captivity, Newton is subjected to an eye X-ray which permanently fuses his contact lenses to his eyes, whereas in the book the X-ray blinds him.
The film also features changes to other characters. In the novel, the Mary-Lou character is called Betty Jo, and she acts merely as a sort of housekeeper, with no suggestion that there is any intimate relationship between her and Newton, although the film's resolution, which sees Bryce and Mary Lou become lovers, follows the plot of the novel.
Another minor change is the character of Newton's mysterious French valet, Brinnarde, who is in fact a CIA agent. In the film this becomes the incidental character of Arthur, Newton's driver.
The film screenplay develops the character of Dr Bryce in considerably more depth than in the novel. in the book Tevis says Bryce is a widower, but an early scene in the film suggests that Bryce may be separated or divorced. The film (graphically) depicts Bryce having sexual encounters with his young female students, and his meeting with Prof. Canutti in the film develops this "mid-life-crisis" aspect even further. Roeg also uses these trysts to introduce the plot point of Bryce's fascination with World Enterprises' new technology -- in the book, Bryce's curiousity is aroused after seeing a movie filmed in the new "Worldcolor" process, whereas in the film Bryce becomes aware of the new technology after his lover uses one of Newton's self-developing cameras to photograph their love-making.
In the film, Bryce's "discovery" of Newton's alien identity -- by secretly photographing him with an X-ray camera -- is closely modelled on the novel. However, by showing a shadowy figure who observes Newton just after he has landed on Earth, Roeg signals from the outset that the government must have known of Newton's presence and kept him under surveillance since the day he arrived, a revelation that is made near the end of the novel.
The film also eliminates a number of significant plot points related to Newton's mission. In the film, the ship is simply to be used as a cargo vessel to transport water back to his planet, which is never named, and no cause is given for the devastating drought which we see.
In the book, however, Newton's space vehicle is intended to return to Anthea automatically and ferry the surviving Antheans back to Earth, after which they plan to infiltrate key government posts and take over the direction of Earth's affairs. In a key chapter, Newton reveals to Bryce that Anthea has been virtually destroyed by a nuclear war which has exterminated several other intelligent species, and that only about one hundred of Newton's own species now survive. He also reveals that the key motivation for his mission is the Antheans' fear that a global nuclear war will devastate the Earth within the next decade unless the Antheans intervene.
The character of Newton's lawyer and amanuensis Oliver Farnsworth (played by Buck Henry) is considerably more developed than in the novel -- Roeg's depiction of Farnsworth's home life clearly suggests that Farnsworth is gay and is in a long-term relationship with a younger man, and Farnsworth's brutal death at the hands of federal agents is another plot point that appears only in the film adaptation.
Depictions of the span and passage of time also differs markedly between the novel and film. The novel uses definite dates to specify time-period, revolving around events such as the elections of presidents and the beginnings of wars -- the book is divided into three main sections, set in the years 1985, 1988 and 1990 respectively, with the entire action in novel taking place over a period of just five years.
In the film, there are no calendars or clocks and there is no overt reference to the passing of the years, although there is one brief indication of the time setting for the first section of the film. When Newton first visits Farnsworth in New York, an establishing street shot shows a banner for the 1976 United States Bicentennial celebrations. This is most likely a reference to the original plot of the novel, in which Newton eventually discovers that he has been detained by the CIA because the incumbent US Democratic administration is desperate that Newton's identity not be revealed because it is an election year (as it was in 1976).
The most obvious time indicator in the film is that, while Newton's appearance never changes, the human characters age markedly, with Rip Torn and Candy Clark passing from youth to late middle-age through the film, suggesting that the action in the film has been expanded to cover a period of perhaps twenty to thirty years.
In fact, the film uses few transitions aside from straight cuts, which, in tandem with surreal montages which could freely be dream sequences, simultaneous events, or parallel realities, intentionally distorting the viewer's sense of the passage of time. Other details are also omitted, such as the name of Newton's home world (Anthea, in the novel) and the fate of Newton's original vehicle to reach Earth.
Many other changes, such as the setting being transformed from Kentucky to New Mexico, hinged for the most part on the film's budget and available resources; according to the bonus "making-of" documentary included on the DVD edition of the film, New Mexico was chosen primarily because it had recently passed new labor laws which allowed the producers to import an all-English crew. But ultimately these changes were used by Nicolas Roeg for more interpretive and artistic purposes; the use of local sand dunes to depict Newton's home world was very useful.
[edit] Trivia
- The film was used as one of the key elements of the novel VALIS by Philip K. Dick, with David Bowie appearing in the novel as "Mother Goose" and the film represented by the titular film "VALIS" (although plot elements were changed dramatically, so that the film became something very different in Dick's novel). It has been reported that Dick genuinely believed that Bowie was attempting to communicate certain esoteric information via The Man Who Fell To Earth (and also via Bowie's album "Station To Station").[citation needed] However, upon meeting Bowie, Dick apparently ceased to believe that Bowie was attempting such subliminal esoteric communication.[citation needed]
- In the scene in which Newton attempts to board his spacecraft, he is greeted by a crowd that includes real-life astronaut Jim Lovell (commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission) and by renowned author Terry Southern, both playing themselves
- Thomas Jerome Newton's mission to save his planet and enlighten the people of earth has many symbolic (and ironic) parallels with the life of Jesus as told in the Gospels. The character Dr. Nathan Bryce functions as a kind of Judas figure who betrays Newton to government scientists. There is a pointed irony in the casting of Rip Torn as Dr. Bryce, given that Torn had previously played the role of Judas Iscariot in Nicholas Ray's 1961 biblical epic, King of Kings.
- Images from the film appear on the covers of the Bowie albums Station to Station and Low, which are said to contain fragments of the soundtrack music he wrote for the film, but which was not used.
- Due to a creative and contractual dispute with Roeg and the studio, no official soundtrack was ever released for the film, even though the 1976 Pan Books paperback edition of the novel ( released to tie in with the film) states on the back cover that the soundtrack is available on RCA. According to Bowie in several interviews over the years, there are no plans to ever release a soundtrack album, and he has absolutely no desire to undertake the effort due to the legal entanglements. Although Bowie was originally approached to provide the music, contractual wrangles during production caused him to withdraw from this aspect of the project, and the music used in the film was co-ordinated by John Phillips, former leader of the pop group The Mamas and The Papas, with contributions from Phillips himself and Japanese percussionist-composer Stomu Yamashta, as well as some stock music.
- Toward the end of the film, in the record store, Bryce walks past a display for David Bowie's Young Americans album.
- The music that Oliver Farnsworth is listening to in his first scene and in one of his last is Holst's The Planets.
- At one point Mary-Lou shouts to Tommy, "Tommy Can You Hear Me?". A reference to The Who's rock-opera Tommy.
- Nicolas Roeg was nominated for the Golden Bear award at the 1976 Berlin International Film Festival.
- actress Candy Clark (Mary Lou) was in a relationship with director Roeg at the time the film was made. She also played Newton's Anthean wife (in heavy makeup) and also played Newton in one scene -- with a hat pulled over her face -- when Bowie was too ill to perform. She also played Newton when he comes out of an office building and enters a limo.
- In a 2001 TV commercial for XM Satellite Radio, David Bowie reprised his role as the alien who "Fell To Earth".
- Bowie's costume was designed by the mother of Slash, the Guns N' Roses guitarist.
