David Bowie in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH – Best Scenes
Starring David Bowie – Nicolas Roeg's acclaimed cult masterpiece. David Bowie makes his unforgettable feature film debut as a visitor from a dying planet who becomes a reclusive multi-millionaire, only to lose himself in an earthbound…
Source: StudiocanalUK
About the Movie
A frail, ginger-haired stranger named Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) arrives in New Mexico with a British passport, a wedding ring he never explains, and a handful of patents so advanced they make him a fortune overnight. Elevator mechanisms, self-developing film, revolutionary electronics — Newton builds World Enterprises into an empire. But the money is not the point. Newton is an alien, from a world dying of drought, and every dollar is meant to fund a ship to carry water home to his wife and children.
Instead, Earth gets to him: television, watching a dozen screens at once; gin; a relationship with a hotel maid (Candy Clark) that is equal parts tenderness and exile. And the world he came to exploit notices him back — rivals, and then the government, close in on a man whose body cannot metabolize his hiding place much longer.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
The Man Who Fell to Earth is one of the essential art films of science fiction, directed by Nicolas Roeg and anchored by a piece of casting that borders on documentary: Bowie, in his first major film role, playing a beautiful, exhausted alien slowly dissolving into human addiction — a performance only he could have given, because half of it was not acting. Adapted from Walter Tevis’s novel, the film treated an alien visitor not as a monster or a messiah but as an immigrant being consumed by the planet he came to use, and it remains one of the most haunting and imitated images of alienation the genre has ever produced.
