Film + TV

David Bowie Is... a real movie star

by Allan Tong

Bowiemania is gripping Canada as David Bowie Is, a multimedia retrospective celebrating The Thin White Duke’s music, fashion, writing, and concert staging, attracts crowds at the Art Gallery of Ontario this fall. However, few realize that Bowie was acting long before 1969’s Space Oddity launched him into rock stardom.

Bowie had just retired Ziggy Stardust when he starred in Nicolas Roeg’s experimental sci-fi flick, The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), playing an alien who journeys to Earth in search of water to rescue his home planet from drought. Probably influenced by the minimalism of Japanese Noh theatre and Lindsay Kemp’s mime that he studied in the late-sixties, Bowie delivered a cool, largely non-verbal performance that perfectly matched Roeg’s off-beat editing and meditative tone. This remains Bowie’s most famous film, and is widely available on DVD.

Though some found Bowie’s performance wooden in Earth, he showed more vulnerability two years later in Just A Gigolo in which he plays a young man romancing older women to survive in decadent Germany between the wars. The film is uneven, but showcases more to Bowie’s acting as he shares the screen with legends Kim Novak and Marlene Dietrich (in her final film). Sadly, Just A Gigolo is hard to find to find aside from old VHS tapes and European DVDs, but deserves to be seen.

Much more accessible are two 1983 films. In Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Bowie plays a stiff-upper-lip British army officer who challenges his captor (played by the formidable Takeshi Kitano) at a World War Two Japanese prison camp. Arguably, it’s Bowie’s best movie performance, showing a steely toughness in his characterization. On the flipside, Bowie’s modern-day vampire in Tony Scott’s The Hunger harks back to the iciness of The Man Who Fell To Earth. Bowie is a supporting player in this gorgeous, but languid horror flick where style smothers substance.

For my money, I’d rather see the 1985 comedy, Into The Night, where Bowie cameos as an hilarious mustached crook, or 1991’s The Linguini Incident, an overlooked screwball comedy where he teams with Rosanna Arquette to plot a heist. Both roles are light years from Bowie’s earlier dramatic roles and are worth tracking down on Ebay, Amazon and YouTube.

Since then, Bowie has appeared sporadically in film, most notably in 1996’s Basquiat, playing his hero Andy Warhol in the late painter’s own white wig. Perhaps Bowie’s recent return to music will lead to more movie roles in the near future. After all, rock’s chameleon is perfectly at home slipping in and out roles on screen.