Fat City, the film that marked the beginning of John Huston’s remarkable late career resurgence, premiered at the Cannes film festival on May 12, 1972. The legendary filmmaker, then sixty-six and coming off several uninspired efforts and an even longer stretch since he’d really had something to say, might have easily shuffled quietly into his twilight years. Instead, reinvigorated here, Huston would go on to make ten more films, featuring some of his best work since the forties, including The Man Who Would Be King (1975) with Sean Connery and Michael Caine; Wise Blood (1979) and Under the Volcano (1984) – small, daring, innovative and off-beat pictures that could easily be taken for the nervy, iconoclastic efforts of an emerging young talent; the very smart and sure-handed Prizzi’s Honor (1985); and his swan song masterpiece, The Dead (1987) which Huston directed from a wheelchair while tethered to oxygen (and dedicated to his final paramour).
Fat City, in broad brush, sounds like a genre picture: an old boxer on the way down meets a novice fighter with promise—early on, the line “I think you got it, kid” is actually uttered. Stacy Keach, never better (and coming off a fine turn as Doc Holiday in Frank Perry’s Doc) stars opposite a then-unknown Jeff Bridges; Susan Tyrrell and Candy Clark play their romantic partners; Nicholas Colasanto (that’s right, coach from Cheers), as the gym-rat lifer who trains and manages a stable of small-time dreamers hoping for their shot, rounds out an excellent cast.
There’s an old saying, “if you’ve seen one boxing picture, you’ve seen them all.” And they do pretty much go like this: a plucky palooka with granite jaw and a heart of gold, against all odds, and with the love of the right woman, gets his improbable shot at the title. (And just when it seems things might go terribly wrong, on the eve of the big fight . . . well, I won’t spoil all those movies for you.) But even if you’ve seen every boxing picture, you haven’t seen Fat City, where losers lose, fighters get beaten and bloodied for a pauper’s share of a modest purse, and hollowed-out late-career journeymen limp from town to town, plying the only trade they know. This is one of the few boxing films that lingers not so much on the violence in the ring, but the long-term consequences of living that life. Nobody walks out of the theater inspired to throw on the gloves and take their shot (or take a drink).
Perhaps most remarkable about Fat City is that it is a bona-fide 70s film—made by one of the lions of the old studio system. Huston, after all, was best known for some of the landmark accomplishments of that period, including, among others, The Maltese Falcon (1941), one of the greatest films ever made and which set the template for the film noir movement that would follow; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), much beloved (though, scandalously, not one of our favorites); Key Largo (1948), and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Yet here Huston crafts a film so seventies in both style and substance that even dedicated devotees of the New Hollywood ethos might stumble out of a preview screening wondering if the movie really had to be that relentlessly downbeat.
Shot on skid row locations in Stockton California, Fat City is deliberate and episodic, unflinching (and unpreaching) in its treatment of race, gender, poverty and the ravages of alcoholism, and boasts, as well it should, an open, unhopeful ending. Huston’s film is also, in true New Hollywood spirit, situated not far from its director’s heart and life experiences, which contribute a certain verisimilitude to the unfolding action. Asked to compare Fat City to his tepid thriller that preceded it, Huston dryly observed “I’ve been a boxer and I’ve never actually served as a spy, so let’s say I’m a little closer to the material. It’s a very personal story.” (That entire, wide ranging interview, conducted by Glenn O’Brien, is a must read. Here’s Huston, for example, on McCabe & Mrs. Miller: “Beautiful performances, great idea . . . exquisite taste…Hats off to Altman.”)
Huston was also very well served by several key collaborators. Leonard Gardner wrote the screenplay from his own novel; other important artists of the era, such as Director of Photography Conrad Hall, and Production Designer Richard Sylbert, surely contributed to the unmistakably New Hollywood look of the film, which is relentlessly naturalistic in both documentary-style exteriors and squintingly under-lit interiors. And Kris Kristofferson’s song “Help Me Make It Through the Night” effectively sets the tone for both the opening and closing sequences. Well received upon release, and lauded in the New York Times as “A knockout scene by that grand old battler, John Huston,” Fat City is accessible in an outstanding edition via the Powerhouse Films Indicator series.
