An interplanetary traveller with pale skin and orange hair touches down in spooky New Mexico, "The Land of Enchantment," and on the strength of several electronics patents he skyrockets to the very heights of high finance ("I want you to begin negotiations with Eastman-Kodak immediately"). The elliptical narrative style tends to conceal the hokeyness in this Walter Tevis sci-fi story, adapted to the screen by Nicolas Roeg. The viewer, at every moment, is required to puzzle out what's happening, and in the process he becomes a sort of collaborator in the storytelling and hopefully becomes less inclined to quibble over the results. Roeg imbues the rather clichéd Americana with vague sinister undertones, but he expresses none of his ideas as clearly as his evident conviction that the world is quite an eyeful. His images, unlike his narrative, are sharp, rich, alluring. David Bowie, in his movie debut, makes a sympathetic and even a believable extraterrestrial, with his wraithlike physique, his sunken cheeks, his lank hair, his chronic dizziness and nosebleeds, his unquenchable thirst, and his intense yearning. Candy Clark, Rip Torn, Buck Henry. (1976) — Duncan Shepherd
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