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Movie Info
Space alien (Bowie) crash lands on Earth, seeking help for his drought-stricken planet. By securing patents to advanced technology, he becomes a fabulously wealthy industrialist. However, money and its attendant decadence ultimately exert a stronger gravitational pull. Bowie seemed perfectly cast as the space traveller, and the film further cemented director Roeg's status as one of the most unique filmmakers of the 1970's. Originally cut by 20 minutes in its 1976 US release, this anniversarypresentation is the complete version
Most Shocking Male Nudity Shots In Cinema History
For Bowie fans, Nicolas Roeg’s surreal sci-fi follow up to the eclipsing Don’t Look Now is rife with trivia for the genius musician. The Man Who Fell To Earth inspired two of his album covers; Low is the film’s poster and Station To Station comes from the most iconic scene in the film. But it also houses something more shocking; the film shows him completely naked.
Who is better than a Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie to play an alien? With fully orange hair and white skin, he already fills the part, which makes it truly shocking when we get to see him in au naturel; all sticky skin and cat eyes, with smoothed over genitals. But while Roeg’s inspired creature design is certainly a marvel, its not this nakedness we’re highlighting here.
Near the end of the film things aren’t going too great for Bowie’s Newton (his extra terrestrial origins have been discovered and the poor guy’s been experimented on), he rediscovers an old flame, leading to a raucous sex scene. Nakedness in sex scenes is fairly common, although not as much as you’d expect, but this places on the list due to their clearly being no body double; it’s David-frickin-Bowie.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
Time Out rating:
<strong>Rating: </strong>5/5
Not yet rated
Time Out says
Tue Jun 21 2011
It may be time to stop calling Nicolas Roeg's sexed-up sci-fi film that vaguely demeaning term---a cult classic---and start addressing it as what it is: the most intellectually provocative genre film of the 1970s. The allure of its perfectly cast star, David Bowie (emaciated and still months from going clean), overshadowed the content of the script in its day. Too easy, it was, to focus on Roeg's cheap-looking effects and the weirdness of the Thin White Duke himself---playing a forlorn alien who quietly builds an Earth-based space program---and ignore Roeg's rich testament to his own strange, adopted land: America.
Go back now and thrill to the movie's evocative terrain, stretching from the canyons of Manhattan to the wide, open spaces of the Southwest---a poetic place of motels, banal government stooges and wild, white horses running alongside trains. (This, by the way, is what a Thomas Pynchon adaptation should look like; the actual novel, by Walter Tevis, is much changed.) The ultimate embodiment of it all is the fearless Candy Clark, playing a sweet caretaker turned mystified lover. Rip Torn's horndog chemist, fighting off his own cynicism, is a close second. The tale is one of a meltdown, situated in a real-life national moment straddling paranoia and the inviting horizon; you can easily hold it up to Nashville, orange hair and all.
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