“A RICH KALEIDOSCOPE OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICA!”
Time Out (London)
Nicolas Roeg’s
The Man Who Fell To Earth
starring David Bowie
New 35mm Print of 70s Sci-Fi Classic at Film Forum
June 24-July 7 Two Weeks
A new 35mm print of the complete, uncut version of Nicolas Roeg’s science fiction classic The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), starring pop icon David Bowie as an extraterrestrial visitor in search of water for his dying planet, will run at Film Forum from Friday, June 23 through Thursday, July 7 (two weeks).
The complete, uncut version of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie as an extra-terrestrial visitor, will be re-released nationally this summer, landing at these theaters:
http://www.rialtopictures.com/manwhofell.html
“Are you Lithuanian?” After a space craft seemingly crashes to Earth, David Bowie walks off to sell a ring for twenty bucks in a dusty Southwestern town, then almost immediately hires high-priced, thick-spectacled patent attorney (Graduate screenwriter Buck Henry) to register ten world-changing patents. Orange-haired, pale-faced, minimally expressioned Bowie (obviously well-cast as an alien in his first starring role) desperately yearns to return himself and water to his parched planet ? but will the authorities let him? ? with coed-shtupping professor Rip Torn providing technical help, and chambermaid Candy Clark providing distractions via overdoses of very terrestrial booze, church, sex, and television.
Roeg’s science fiction cult classic/cautionary moral tale is an assault of fragmented, non-linear narrative style, typically striking visuals, echt 70s soundtrack by John Phillips of The Mamas and Papas (along with period “needle drops”), with a pathbreaking no-comment depiction of a gay couple and multiple eye-brow-raising sexual romps ? including one punctuated by gunshots. All too often seen in washed-out copies ? and cut by 20 minutes in its first U.S. release — this new 35mm print of the uncut director’s version allows Roeg’s dazzling visuals (Pauline Kael called him “the most visually seductive of directors”) to be seen as they were meant to be. The re-release marks the film’s 35th anniversary.
Showtimes daily (except June 27 & July 4): 1:00, 3:45, 7:00 & 9:35
Mondays, June 27 & July 4: 1:00, 3:45 & 8:45
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“ABSORBING AND BEAUTIFUL! Mr. Roeg has chosen the garish, translucent, androgynous-mannered rock-star, David Bowie, for his space visitor. The choice is inspired. Mr. Bowie gives an extraordinary performance. The details, the chemistry of this tall pale figure with black-rimmed eyes are clearly not human. Yet he acquires a moving, tragic force as the stranger caught and destroyed in a strange land.”
Richard Eder, The New York Times
“A SINGULAR, HAUNTING SCI-FI EXPERIENCE! Like Roeg’s Walkabout, Man Who Fell to Earth is an exploration of an individual’s grappling with an unfamiliar and unfriendly landscape, but whereas in Walkabout the landscape is the Australian outback, here it’s the entirety of Earth.”
Matt Noller, Slant Magazine
“Released the year before Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars, a science fiction film without science, a terrestrial space opera minus matte shots, models, or pyrotechnics that leaves us not wondering at the stars but grieving for ourselves. Roeg delights here in taking away the crutch of time (it has puzzled people whether 25 minutes or 25 years have passed in the film), eliminating transitions, cross-cutting, flashing forward and back, piling dissolve upon dissolve, letting the camera jerk and twirl and zoom finding new ways to see familiar things, while speculating on what the world might look like to someone from Out There.”
Robert Lloyd
“Science fiction drama, Western, love story, metaphysical mystery, satire of modern America the most beguiling of the films that, in a dozen years embracing the 1970s, established Roeg as a mainstream heir to such 60s experimentalists as Resnais, Godard, and Marker Roeg is more interested in showing how life on Earth is stranger and more disconcerting than anything in outer space. Bowie made his exquisite film debut in a role that chimed iconographically with his androgynous, futuristic pop persona of the early seventies.”
Graham Fuller
140 min | 1976 | Color  - A Rialto Pictures Release