Fat City (1972)

What makes it different from others?

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Absolutely amazing

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

One of John Huston's late masterpieces. In fact, if "Fat City" were the only John Huston film you were ever to see you would still know you were watching the work of a great director. Leonard Gardner adapted his own novel about a punch-drunk boxer hoping to make a comeback and Huston transformed it into a sad, funny elegy on the themes of loss and survival; every scene makes a point, every scene hits home.It's also magnificently acted. Stacy Keach is Tully, the boxer who's a born loser. Jeff Bridges is the younger boxer who's 'soft in the middle' and who's no more likely to make it than Tully. Nicholas Colasanto steals almost every scene he's in as their manager, sadly another loser and there's a phenomenal performance from Susan Tyrrell as the lush Keach takes up with. She was Oscar-nominated and she should have won. This is also one of the greatest boxing pictures ever made.

In the past, some studios in Hollywood considered themselves to be in a privileged position as they were producing a highly disparate genre of films about boxing and boxers.These films were made by a separate team who would write scripts,choose actors and direct films about success stories being crafted in boxing rings.One such 'boxing film' was briefly described in Coen brothers' "Barton Fink" starring actor John Turturro who is being asked by a studio executive to write a 'boxing picture'."Fat City" is also a boxing picture but it does not have anything in common with boxing pictures of the past.Director John Huston did not want to portray boxers as 'super heroes'.He aimed to present an honest account of boxers as ordinary human beings with their own share of joys as well as sorrows. Each person in this film is plagued with numerous personal problems. Superb acting performances by Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges convince viewers to believe that poverty is a serious curse which leaves many strongmen broken hearted. Director John Huston was brutal to the core to show that even tough guys such as boxers are affected by poverty and are forced to do menial jobs in order to survive in a difficult world.

By the time John Huston made Fat City in 1972 his glory as one of the finest directors in Hollywood was fading. But this character study put him back up on top of the A list with the new breed of filmmakers of the period who were essentially going against the political core of the established movie-making industry.In Stockton California ex-boxer Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) takes a job as a day laborer to make ends meet and takes a break to go to the gym for a workout. When he meets young Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) and spars with him he is impressed with his natural boxing abilities. Tully sends Ernie to meet his former manager who takes the young boxer into his care for training. When Tully isn't working he hangs out in bars talking of his return to the ring. He meets Oma (Susan Tyrrell) in a bar and moves in with her and returns to his manager to train for another fight. Meanwhile Ernie settles down with a pregnant wife and continues to pursue his boxing and support his family. Through all the trials and tribulations each man learns that the value of his own life is a culmination of hard-earned small victories.The film is a study in the balance of styles, and characters, sometimes opposites, but always comparing one with another. Stacy Keach's washed up boxer Billy Tully is balanced against eager, youthful Jeff Bridges as Ernie Munger and in this comparison the filmmakers make a simple statement of how choices of occupations not only determine a man's character, but his fate as well.The women figures in the film are also designed around a symbolic fulcrum. The world weary Oma as played by Susan Tyrell could be the future or the opposite of Candy Clark's innocence loving Faye. Oma is resentful and intoxicated, whereas Faye is enlightened by her new-found knowledge of the relationship that can occur between man and woman.Each veteran boxer is introduced to the viewer lying down and coming to life as if resurrected from the dead. We first meet Tully rolling over in bed just looking for a light for his cigarette, and as he continues moving about into the world, gives up and just moves out of his rented room. Later we are introduced to the pro boxer, Sixto Rodriguez's Lucero moving up from a prone position to take some unidentified medication and appearing in the bathroom with medical troubles.Aside from the open-ended existentialism of the narrative, the cinematography by Conrad L. Hall which captures the natural light and urban landscape of the skid row area of Stockton Californiais worth the visit to this film. Many scenes of dialogue-less action feature merely the visual content of the world of small dreams and broken hopes.The look of the film recalls in many ways the canvasses of Edward Hopper with whole areas of light dedicated to details of the landscape and its weight on solitary human figures residing within the frame. Hall's work can be seen in classics such as Cool Hand Luke from 1967, the Oscar-winning films Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid from 1969, American Beauty from 1999, and the graphic-novel adaptation Road to Perdition from 2002. Hall is one of only six cinematographers to have his own star on the Hollywood walk of fame.The film was based on the boxing novel Fat City (1969) by Leonard Gardner, who penned the script for the movie. Virtually all the shooting was on location in a part of the skid row section of Stockton that doesn't exist anymore. Thus this movie is partly an historical document of the city and what it looked like before progress paved the way for a new highway and torn down many of the buildings.This film is one to return to again for the excellent direction, the great substantial acting and the beautiful cinematography. Cherish it as one of John Huston's best works.

John Huston is amazing to me. He defined an entire genre with his foot barely in the Hollywood door, then he kicked the door down and walked in to clear well deserved Oscars as both writer and director, he took his Oscars with him to Africa to get hammered with Erol Flynn and go out on safaris leaving behind him a big production to go to hell, then came back to find they had nailed a new door in place of the one he had torn down so he didn't bother to knock at all this time, he packed his things and went to a small dingy bar where Mexicans and barflies go to kill their time to make movies about killing time, movies about misfits and people who are dead inside, movies like Fat City and Under the Volcano, to adapt Flannery O'Connor and James Joyce, to soar above and beyond what anyone might have expected from any director of his generation. It's 1972 and John Huston is still relevant as ever. How many directors can you name who turned out some of their best material in their fifth decade directing movies? Venerable relics like Clint Eastwood move over, American cinema (not simply Hollywood) already had a patriarch in place long before any of you looked through a viewfinder.It's also amazing to me how an indomitable absolute badass of a successful director can know failure so well. This is a movie where people box but it's not about boxing. There's no triumph to be had here and the crowd gathered in the small suburban boxing hall in Stockton, California, to pass their time is not there to be pleased. Most of them are probably the same kind of deadbeat with no future and a sh-tty job as the third-grade boxers who beat each other for their amusement. We get the young upstart boxer with the fast legs and a bright future ahead of him if only someone could train him right but this character can only make sense when we see him standing next to Stacy Keach, the aging boxer who won't see thirty again and who maybe had a chance once but blew it for women and alcohol and now he's desperate for one last throw of the dice.The sad beauty of Fat City is that we're not looking at some kind of last defiant stand, we don't enter the ring for one last moment of triumph with the lights blaring bright and the crowd cheering, this is not The Wrestler anymore than it is Rocky, the lights were not only dimmed long ago but they probably never shone bright enough anywhere except in the protagonist's head. The closest Stacy Keach came to glory some odd 10 years ago was in itself a failure. Were his eyebrows slashed with a razor or not that fateful night down in Mexico we never find out. For most of its duration Fat City is a beaten man with sunken cheeks and a grim unshaven wan face wearing an expression of incredulous outrage. Then we're inside a rundown cafe, the walls are painted in sickly washed-out colors and old men play cards around tables in felt, and we sit down for one last cup of coffee on the cheap formica counter. We see the young boxer standing next to the washed-up has-been one who can't even be a mentor anymore and an old man, a walking shell of someone "who was maybe young once", comes over to serve us and it all makes sense. "Maybe he's happy" says the young one. "Maybe we all are" says the other, and we know we're not, life doesn't quite work out that way, but it's all we have. The old man turns and smiles a toothless smile (senile or knowing, who's to say) and Fat City fades out into one of the most touching heartfelt endings I've seen. Fatalists cannot afford to miss this one, it's the stuff dashed hopes and broken lives are made of. Rejoice.