This lack of enthusiasm from his label perhaps accounts for Bowie’s seemingly offhand attitude towards Low’s artwork. “The reason was very corny,” Bowie explained of this straight-out cop from the MWFTE poster. “You see the album cover has a profile of me on it, and on the album itself I keep a very ‘low profile.’ I was very disappointed no one picked up on that. I thought it would have been obvious.”

Despite its commercial failure, The Man Who Fell to Earth developed a cult following over the years and remains the ultimate cinematic document of peak Bowie, his aloof, celestial image literalized in his playing of an actual extraterrestrial. Unsurprisingly, the man himself was a good deal distant from the persona(e) he had created, one who had the capacity to behave both reprehensibly and decently throughout his life. “Obviously his image is that he would be a freaky guy that dressed funny. We’d all seen the characters he portrayed over the years,” his longtime bassist Gail Ann Dorsey mused after his death. “Nothing about him was flashy or ostentatious or over the top. He was very normal.”

“Normal,” of course, is not the first word that leaps to mind at the mention of the name “David Bowie,” and it was not a characterization that many fans, or moviegoers, either wanted or could envision. While the artist never ceased to remind us that his assorted guises were just that, it proved difficult for viewers (including critics) to accept Bowie as anything other than “Bowie” whenever he tried his hand at acting. Where reviews of MWFTE had praised the aptness of his casting — “a convincing alien life form whose loneliness is beyond human experience” (Screen International), “clearly not human” (The Guardian) — subsequent assessments of Bowie’s performances in leading roles were more likely to castigate his apparent inability to play a human being. (Of his playing of a Manhattan bartender in the 1991 The Linguini Incident, Variety pilloried him as “completely miscast … too old and more like a toothy alien than a romantic lead.”)

This tradition began with Bowie’s immediate follow-up to The Man Who Fell to Earth. Originally, Bowie had announced that his next film would be the WWII thriller The Eagle Has Landed, in which he would star alongside Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland. “Sutherland is the reason that I chose to do it. If it wasn’t for Sutherland and the money, I wouldn’t be interested,” Bowie said at the time. “I’m more interested in a Bergman film called The Serpent’s Egg which is coming up, and I’d do that for nothing, just to work with Bergman.”

As it happened, Bowie would not get to work with either Sutherland or the Swedish master (who instead cast David Carradine as his Serpent’s lead), though he would find himself in a film with a setting similar to that of Bergman’s portrait of pre-Nazi Germany: Just a Gigolo, the tale of a Prussian WWI veteran who winds up a high-priced male prostitute in Berlin.