The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Nicolas Roeg's 1976 adaptation of Walter Tevis's novel arrives at the examination table as a curiosity of another era. David Bowie plays Thomas Jerome Newton, an extraterrestrial who lands in New Mexico, patents his way to a fortune, and attempts to ship water home to a dying planet. The film is slow, surreal, and stubbornly resistant to explanation. Roger Ebert found it preposterous. Pauline Kael found it romantic. Both were correct, which tells us most of what we need to know about this vintage.

Where the film brushes against contemporary social consciousness, it does so once, and quietly. Newton's conglomerate, World Enterprises, attracts the attention of rival corporate interests and the federal government, who together seize him, sedate him, and murder his business partner. There is a critique of concentrated wealth in that arrangement, of capital as a trap that swallows the brilliant outsider and keeps him comfortable in a locked room. It is present. It is not preached. The camera observes the cage instead of lecturing about it, and the result lands closer to melancholy than to agitation.

The remainder of the ledger is empty. The women in the story exist as lovers, drinkers, and casualties of time, with no thesis attached to them. Bernie Casey appears in a supporting role that never comments on his race. Newton's habit of watching several televisions at once reads as dislocation and creeping addiction, not as a coded portrait of a different mind. The drought on his home planet functions as a plot device, not as an environmental parable. And no sermon waits at the end of the tunnel, only Bowie's face collapsing into a restaurant chair.

This is a sommelier's nightmare in one respect and a quiet pleasure in another: nothing here has been fortified for modern consumption. It is strange, sad, and entirely its own thing. We grade it accordingly, and we drink alone.