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The Man Who Fell to Earth: A Provocative Contemplation of Corruption and Despair
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Science Fiction Film Club
The Man Who Fell to Earth: A Provocative Contemplation of Corruption and Despair
David Bowie stars in a beautifully filmed tale of alienation, misery, and failure.
By Kali Wallace
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Published on February 11, 2026
Credit: British Lion Films
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Credit: British Lion Films
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) Directed by Nicolas Roeg. Written by Paul Mayersberg based on the novel of the same name by Walter Nevis. Starring David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark, and Buck Henry.
It was the summer of 1974 in Los Angeles. English music superstar David Bowie was on tour in America. He was promoting Diamond Dogs, the first album he’d released after retiring his alien glam-rock stage persona Ziggy Stardust. Along for part of the tour was BBC producer and director Alan Yentob, who was making a documentary about Bowie for the long-running television series Omnibus. Yentob’s film, Cracked Actor, aired on BBC1 in January, 1975.
Cracked Actor has never been officially released in any other format, but you can find the complete film all over the internet. It’s 50 minutes of conversations in cars and hotel rooms interspersed with concert footage, and all of it is implicitly fueled by so much cocaine. Whether that appeals to you depends a great deal, I suspect, on how interested you are in David Bowie in particular and the 1970s rock star life in general.
The documentary caught the attention of a film casting agent by the name of Maggie Abbott, who was looking for somebody to play the lead role in a sci fi film to be directed by Nicolas Roeg. The requirements for the role were a bit unusual: the actor had to look not quite human. Roeg’s first choice for the role hadn’t been an actor at all but author Michael Crichton, who was 6’9”; another choice was Peter O’Toole. Neither of them were available or interested. (They also didn’t look like aliens, but movie magic is a powerful thing.) That’s why Abbott was still searching for the right person, and why she screened Cracked Actor for Roeg and suggested that he consider Bowie for the role.
It wasn’t as wild an idea as it might seem on the surface. Although Bowie had only a few small acting credits to his name, it would not be Roeg’s first time working with a musician in a film. He had already co-directed Performance (1970), a crime film about a gangster who goes into hiding in the home of a rocker played by Mick Jagger.
The casting was almost doomed before it began, because Bowie forgot about their first meeting and assumed, when he realized he would be about an hour late, that Roeg would have given up and left. But Roeg hadn’t left. He waited at Bowie’s house for eight hours. When they finally met, Bowie was so embarrassed he hadn’t read the screenplay that he agreed to do the movie to avoid the awkwardness of a longer conversation, which just might be the most British interaction I’ve ever heard of.
Roeg was a well-respected filmmaker who had started his career in film right after getting out of the army following World War II. He began working at Marylebone Studios in London as a clapper-boy, or the person on set who worked the “clappers” to make a distinctive noise that would allow the film and audio tracks to be synced. He eventually worked his way up to camera operator, and throughout the ’60s he was worked as a cinematographer on such diverse films as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966). By the end of the decade he’d shifted into directing; Performance, which he co-directed with screenwriter Donald Cammell, was his first film as director. He followed it up with two movies that earned a lot of acclaim: Walkabout (1971) and Don’t Look Now (1973).
The Man Who Fell to Earth is based on the 1963 novel of the same title by Walter Tevis. The story in the book is pretty much what we see in the film, with some variations; screenwriter Paul Mayersberg wrote a piece for Sight and Sound in 1975 explaining how he went about adapting the novel into the screenplay, as well as a bit about how the story evolved during filming.
The plot isn’t a complicated one: An alien visitor named Thomas Jerome Newton (played by Bowie) comes to Earth searching for water for his drought-stricken planet. He uses his superior technological knowledge and the help of patent lawyer Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry) to found a major corporation; his goal is to use his great wealth to build a spaceship to get back to his home planet, in order to bring resources and rescue survivors. But as he amasses wealth and power on Earth, Newton become involved with a young woman, named Betty Jo in the book and Mary Lou in the movie (and played by Candy Clark), and begins drinking heavily. His work attracts the attention of curious scientist Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) as well as the U.S. government; the latter responds by detaining him and performing experiments on him. His mission disrupted, Newton gives up on returning to his home planet, and wastes away on Earth.
It’s a story that spans decades, focuses heavily on a man’s descent into misery and failure, all of which leads to a sad, heavy ending—so honestly, it was perfect for a ’70s director looking to make an artsy, depressing sci fi movie.
Tevis’ first novel, The Hustler, had already been made into an extremely successful 1961 film starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. The Man Who Fell to Earth was his second novel. Even though there was some suggestion at the time of its publication that he was a literary author dabbling in science fiction, Tevis had written several sci fi short stories already and was no stranger to the genre.
In a 1981 interview (reprinted in Brick in 2003), Tevis said, “Where did The Man Who Fell to Earth fall from? He fell from San Francisco… essentially that book is a very disguised autobiography. It is based upon my own feelings from time to time that I’m from another planet.” He ties the themes in the book to his own childhood, during which he moved from San Francisco to Kentucky, where he spent a long time in a children’s hospital, isolated and unhappy. Tevis is also very frank about the role his own alcoholism played in the story: “Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth is about my becoming an alcoholic, really. That’s my private story about my sense of my own physical weakness and my sense of my not really being human…”
This reminds me of what Eliseo Subiela said about Man Facing Southeast (1986) and his reasons for setting it in a psychiatric hospital. Both stories are at their core about exploring a feeling of alienation from other humans by making that alienation literal, and both use conditions that are largely marginalized and judged harshly, such as mental illness and addiction, to emphasize a sense of isolation within society. When I was reading about that movie, I found writers who mentioned that it followed in the footsteps of The Man Who Fell to Earth, but I have no idea if Subiela ever saw it.
I hadn’t read The Man Who Fell to Earth before I watched the movie and started writing this column, but I borrowed the ebook from my library to read a bit and get a sense for Tevis’ style. I was immediately sucked in, to the point where I wanted to stop research and keep reading. The writing is fantastic and evocative and so engaging, with a sort of mournful, meandering feel. In a 2004 column in The Boston Globe, author James Sallis wrote about Tevis and his work, and he described The Man Who Fell to Earth as, “…one of the most heartbreaking books I know, a threnody on great ambition and terrible failure, and an evocation of man’s absolute, unabridgeable aloneness.”
Beyond the casting, there really isn’t that much that’s exciting about the production of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Because it stars one of the biggest rock stars of all time, and was made during a period when he was very publicly going through some personal and professional troubles, journalists and critics seem to have expected that there would be some drama on set. There’s an amusing article that was published in the rock music magazine Creem (readable on the Bowie archive page Bowie Golden Years) in which it sure sounds like the writers went in hoping for something exciting, like maybe a cocaine bender or wild orgies or something.
Alas, it was not to be, because the filming went pretty smoothly. The movie was filmed in New Mexico, and according to Candy Clark as well as Roeg and others on the production, it was a fairly pleasant experience.
Where we do find some good old-fashioned sex, drugs, and rock & roll was in the making of the film’s soundtrack, which Bowie wasn’t involved with at all. There’s a 2016 article about the whole ordeal in The Guardian, and it would make a pretty good (trashy) Hollywood film in itself.
Bowie was originally supposed to write the soundtrack. He went into the film thinking he was going to provide the music, and it would have come after his Young Americans (1975) album. But after three months of work he had produced nothing usable. That, coupled with what appeared to be some big misunderstandings, left Roeg in the awkward position of having a film that was supposed to premiere in a few months but had no music.
Roeg called up John Phillips, better known as the singer and songwriter for The Mamas & the Papas. Roeg had met Phillips a few years before when he offered Phillips’ wife at the time, Genevieve Waite, the role of Mary Lou in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Phillps objected, because he wanted to write a sci fi rock musical for Waite to star in, and that led to a physical fight between the two men. People just don’t get into drunken fist fights about sci fi rock musicals anymore, do they?
But their brief enmity didn’t last, because a few years later Roeg offered Phillips the chance to do the soundtrack for The Man Who Fell to Earth. Phillips agreed, even though he, like everybody else, didn’t really understand why Bowie wasn’t doing it. There were some more shenanigans involving fights, cocaine, and, somehow, a tryst with Mick Jagger’s wife during the writing and recording, but Phillips did end up providing much of the soundtrack.
What that Guardian article doesn’t say—possibly because there’s no sex or cocaine involved, but who knows?—is that some of the music in The Man Who Fell to Earth was also composed and performed by Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta. The weird, cool, sci fi-y, prog rock parts of the score were Yamash’ta’s, while the parts that sound either like twangy Americana or smooth jazz were Phillips, and I think both parts work quite well. It’s an interesting soundtrack. Very ’70s, but not in a bad way. None of it was composed or performed by Bowie, which is a bit sad. I would have loved to hear what Bowie’s version of the soundtrack, if he had ever written it.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about The Man Who Fell to Earth. I’ve been thinking about it since I watched it, so it definitely wormed its way into my head. Overall, I think it’s a fascinating but flawed movie. The film starts out brilliantly, Bowie is great in the lead role, and it’s undeniably beautiful to look at. But I think it drags a bit too long in the second half, and there are places where I simply wished for more. I wish there was more depth for the characters of Mary Lou and Nathan Bryce; Candy Clark and Rip Torn both do a great job with what they are given, but they could have been given much more…
In that interview published in Brick, Walter Tevis offers thoughts on Roeg’s film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tevis, who was an English teacher for twenty-five years, said, “I give it a C-plus.”
His critique of the film is an interesting one, because it comes down to a fundamental disagreement about how to tell stories that are meant to be understood on many levels. He said of Roeg’s work, “…I think he feels that it isn’t art if you can understand it, and I hate that notion. I really hate it. And I think when you do a parable, which is more or less what I do in science fiction, you have to be up front about what’s going on in the foreground.”
I think, based on the date of that interview, that Tevis was talking about the version of The Man Who Fell to Earth that the distributor shaved by twenty minutes against Roeg’s wishes. But I’m not sure, and I don’t know how the different versions would have affected his opinion. I will say that even with the longer version, I can see where he’s coming from: This is a movie that cares more about the underlying parable of innocence falling to corruption than it does about the flow of the foreground story of a man losing sight of his purpose over decades.
I don’t think that’s a fatal flaw, nor do I agree with him that the foreground plot always has to be crystal clear for a story to work. I have loved films like Stalker (1979) or High Life (2018) where the clarity of the foreground plot is nowhere near as important as the underlying emotional and philosophical elements. But I do think that parts of The Man Who Fell to Earth are disjointed in a way that distract from the underlying parable, and I can see why Tevis felt the way he did. Roger Ebert said in his 1976 review: “…there’s nothing more frustrating than asking logical questions about a movie that insists on being visionary.”
What do you think of The Man Who Fell to Earth and its take on the alien visitor as a metaphor for part of the human experience?
Next week: I like to keep things challenging by covering a truly obscure film now and then, so we’re watching Grigori Kromanov’s Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, which is streaming in just a couple of places.[end-mark]
The post <i>The Man Who Fell to Earth</i>: A Provocative Contemplation of Corruption and Despair appeared first on Reactor.
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