![]() Though he doesn’t do anything as gauche as to express it directly, the unyielding pain of his character is present from first frame to last. Bowie plays the willowy, ageless starman who dubs himself Thomas Newton and swiftly goes about executing his elaborate mission. Though the story is about an alien bestowing superior technology to Earth’s scientists as a long-shot method of saving the people of his own desolate, faraway planet (and succumbing to depression and alcoholism in the process), it’s a more edifying work if taken as a shot of pure emotion. ![]() In the interim since completing that assignment, The Man Who Fell to Earth is the Roeg film I’ve returned to the most often, as it feels like this monolithic edifice that’s too mighty to mount on single pass. You’d be hard pressed to claim that these stars delivered great performances in the traditional schema of movie acting, but their very presence – their essence – is what made these films idiosyncratic and, by extension, memorable and great. The sensuality, the editing, the hallucinatory sounds design, the violence… The one that I was a little unsure of way back when was 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on a novel by Walter Tevis and starring the rock icon David Bowie who, in the music world, was teetering on the precipice of his creatively fecund ‘Berlin’ era.Īs he had done with Mick Jagger in Performance and, later, Art Garfunkel in Bad Timing, Roeg was proving himself a master of benignly leaching off of the inherent talents of musicians and channeling them into an on-screen mood. I was scintillated by what I saw, and with each film I watched I seemed to have a new personal favourite. The problem was, I’d only seen a couple of them (Walkabout and, strangely, Track 29), so carved out a block of duvet time to sail through the canon in chronological order. Man… where to even start? I was given an assignment at a previous job to write about the films of Nicolas Roeg for a season at London’s BFI Southbank.
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