The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) & The Man from Planet X (1951)

A spaceship comes down on a foggy Scottish moor, and a small figure in a fishbowl helmet climbs out and holds out his hands. Twenty-five years later another visitor walks down a hillside in New Mexico and this one looks a lot like David Bowie...

Two aliens from dying planets, both arriving alone, and neither getting much of a welcome. The Man from Planet X is one of the very first films of the 50s alien boom. Edgar G. Ulmer shot it in six days on leftover sets from Ingrid Bergman's Joan of Arc and buried them in fog. The Man Who Fell to Earth is Nicolas Roeg taking the same idea, but this time he puts us inside the alien's head so we see the world form his perspective.

The thematic link here is that once again the alien isn't the problem. Planet X's visitor only turns on the village after Mears has tortured him, and the film signs off wondering what he might have been if we'd been kind. Newton never threatens anyone. He gets locked up, x-rayed until the lenses hiding his alien eyes fuse to his retinas, and is left drinking himself into a stupor. Near the end he tells Bryce his own people would probably have done the same to us. It's the most honest line in the series so far, and the saddest.

In this episode we get into Californian actors doing Scottish accents so thick Matt needed the subtitles on, an alien with the face of an elf on the shelf, an alien who talks in musical tones twenty-six years before Close Encounters, Paramount refusing to pay for Roeg's finished film, Bowie admitting he didn't really have to act, and whether you could skip the first hour of a cult classic and lose nothing.

Leave his gas canister alone, pour yourself a neat gin, and settle in.

Listen now.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time.

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