As the Thin White Duke returns to the big screen in Moonage Daydream, David Michael Brown looks back at the singer’s confounding but brilliant career in film.
Moonage Daydream
It was no surprise that David Bowie caught the acting bug. Throughout his career, he has stretched the visual possibilities of music. Whether hiding under the glitz, glamour and grease paint of Ziggy Stardust or floating in a tin can as Major Tom, the artist formally known as David Jones has pushed boundaries.
In the glam era he played with gender, in the mid-’70s he embraced soul music and at the tail end of the decade, he played with song form when he moved to Berlin with his best mate Iggy Pop. It was the ’80s that saw Bowie achieve the stardom he always craved with his Let’s Dance album and globe-conquering Serious Moonlight tour. A wish that proved to be a poison chalice artistically when he entered his “Phil Collins years”. It was also the decade that saw the Thin White Duke get hooked on the silver screen. But not before he starred in a few oddities.
From early on in his fledgling music career in the late ’60s and early ’70s he was experimenting with performance and mime. He was also an early exponent of the music video and his clips for tracks like Life on Mars?, directed by legendary rock photographer Mick Rock. He starred in the short film The Image in 1971. Rated “X” for violence, the black-and-white art piece was directed by Michael Armstrong, the man behind the notorious video nasty Mark of the Devil. He also made an uncredited blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the ’60s anti-war comedy The Virgin Soldiers.
The big surprise was it took so long for him to make his feature debut on the big screen. In 1976 he took on the lead role in Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of the Walter Tevis novel The Man Who Fell to Earth. Starring opposite Candy Clark and Rip Torn, the Golden Years singer was, for all intents and purposes, an alien version of himself, playing the titular visitor to our planet with aloof aplomb.
As T.J. Newton, his skinny drug-addled frame was the perfect canvas for an awkward extra-terrestrial who lands on Earth on a desperate mission of mercy to save his parched planet. The fictitious character paralleled Bowie’s own experiences touring the States as Newton discovers loneliness, addiction and despair. He is brilliant in the otherworldly role that arguably remains his finest performance.
His next film was a fascinating fiasco. “Everybody who was involved in that film—when they meet each other now, they look away,” he told NME in a 1980 interview about Just a Gigolo. “It was my 32 Elvis Presley movies rolled into one.” With Blow-Up star David Hemmings behind the camera, Vertigo’s Kim Novak and the legendary Marlene Dietrich as his co-stars, Bowie seemed ill at ease. He starred as Paul Ambrosius von Przygodski, a young Prussian man who escapes the trenches of World War I to become a gigolo in East Berlin.
Shot in West Berlin during the cold war, the movie was a mess. The world wasn’t ready for an ill-conceived comedy involving former Nazis. Even if it did star Bowie. The singer told the BBC that he did the film because Dietrich had been “dangled in front of me.” Alas the legend wouldn’t leave Paris so the pair never met. When asked what she was like to work with he joked, “I wish I knew, I must ask somebody who did work with her!”
It would be six years before he acted again on the cinema screen. He appeared as himself in Uli Edel’s harrowing Christiane F. in 1981 performing a concert that the titular teen attends. He memorably took the lead in British director Alan Clarke’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal for British television. In 1980 he took to the stage on “The Great White Way” making his Broadway debut as John Merrick in The Elephant Man. With no prosthetics, the singer portrayed the disfigured Victorian with only body movements and vocal affectations to much fanfare from the New York theatre-going public.
And then came 1983. Riding on the success of his biggest album to date, he was not only filling stadiums but getting bums on cinema seats. In Tony Scott’s slick vampire flick The Hunger he played the jealous partner to the ageless Catherine Deneuve. While she was immortal, Bowie’s character was ageing rapidly, thanks to latex legend Dick Smith.
Bowie, a huge fan of In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion, jumped at the chance to work with Japanese director Nagisa Ôshima on Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence that same year. Playing a defiant British POW in WWII Japan, Bowie held his own up against Tom Conti, Japanese superstar Takeshi Kitano, Aussie Jack Thompson and fellow musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. The role of Major Jack Celliers is one of the Let’s Dance singer’s most compelling, lending the solider grace and dignity as he locks heads with Sakamoto’s psychotic but confused Japanese camp commandant. Their tense scenes together bristling with a frisson of homo-eroticism.
It’s often in smaller roles that Bowie has shined. He landed a killer cameo in John Landis’s Into the Night alongside Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer, a hilarious mike drop in Zoolander when he judged the “walk-off” between Derek (Ben Stiller) and Hansel (Owen Wilson), he memorably belted out the sweeping theme of Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners and played Andy Warhol in the biopic Basquiat. He even interrupted a summer holiday in Mexico when he met Monty Python’s Graham Chapman and Eric Idle on a beach and agreed to make a brief appearance in the 1983 pirate romp Yellowbeard as “The Shark.”
Bowie may have worked with Hollywood heavyweights like Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ), Christopher Nolan (The Prestige) and David Lynch (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) but it is a dark twisted kid’s film that remains a family favourite. His role as Jareth the Goblin King in Jim Henson’s Muppet fantasy Labyrinth saw Bowie star opposite a young Jennifer Connelly—best known at the time for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America and Dario Argento’s Phenomena—and a host of Henson monstrous creations. Oozing charisma in a spikey fright wig and preposterously tight tights, Bowie even throws in a few catchy pop songs into the mix for good measure.
Bowie pursued his acting career with the same intelligence and vigour that made his musical career such a joy to experience. He constantly challenged his legions of fans’ pre-conceptions and stretched his own talents as an actor. Little wonder then, that the wild eyed boy from Brixton was recently voted the most influential British artist of the last fifty years.
