Fat City (1972)

Fat City (USA, 1972) 96 min color DIR: John Huston. PROD: Ray Stark. SCR: Leonard Gardner, based on his own novel. MUSIC: Kenneth Hall. DOP: Conrad Hall. CAST: Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrrell, Candy Clark, Nicholas Colasanto. (Columbia)

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This is a desert island movie for me, so forgive any superlatives in the following text. After a near-decade of uneven pictures, director John Huston was hired by Columbia producer Ray Stark to adapt Leonard Gardner’s acclaimed 1969 novel for the screen. The result is a cinematic masterpiece– a poetic adaptation of a poetic, cinematic novel. And yet, while Gardner adapted his own novel for the screen, the screenplay is different from the book. He ignored the moments that may have read well, but would not properly translate to film, and especially, wrote a new ending which does not do injustice to the novel (his book doesn’t end, it just stops), but makes more sense visually. Thus, each variation of his story works perfectly in its own medium.

With Huston on board, and the great Conrad Hall as cinematographer, Fat City is a necessarily gritty, deeply affecting tonal poem of despair. At this point in his career, Stacy Keach was doing a lot of offbeat films (Doc; Watched; The Travelling Executioner) which admittedly showed his versatile talent. Huston gave him the role of his life as Billy Tully, the washed-up, alcoholic, 30-something ex-boxer who now makes a semblance of a living picking in the fields. He encourages a much younger man (Jeff Bridges) to start fighting– and this partially prompts him to get back into the ring himself. This is not a movie about fame and fortune– everyone in this film is just trying to get by. Fat City is all about the choices people make to shape their futures, until fate deals them another hand. Bridges’ character Ernie has to make domestic decisions which will ultimately affect his career -which may not have amounted to much anyway- now that his girlfriend (the great Candy Clark) is pregnant. Tully meanwhile slowly realizes how much his own life is fading away- drifting from one meaningless job to the next in a perpetual hangover, still in love with the wife who has long deserted him. Things get worse when he shacks up with a woman who equally abuses the bottle. Cult star, underground favourite Susan Tyrrell had her most mainstream role as Oma (she even received an Oscar nomination), the shrill, pouty, cynical (realist?) hapless girl whose life has had many tragic turns. Eventually, her stormy relationship with Tully reaches its end in a hair-raising scene I have never forgotten, one of the most dramatic moments in all of cinema, as Tully tries to get her drunken body out of bed to eat dinner, and then the two just end up screaming at each other out of their frustrated inability to communicate. It is sad, heart-pounding, and real.

Fat City was shot (and set) in Stockton, California; an offramp city with many canning factories which draw from the crops in the nearby fields. Huston keeps the frame wide open to see how this environment plays a part in his characters lives, and Hall shoots the film like a documentary. The dumpy bars, boxing rings, diners and bowling alleys are captured in their properly dingy, sweaty ambiance, recalling the same gritty authenticity of the early urban scenes in Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I am always watching the backgrounds for the fascinating local colour, hired as extras. This movie is equally about them– the illiterate, urban poor in cheap suits, sweaty T-shirts and cigarette smoke halos. (In one moment out in the fields, a man talks about how wine ended his marriage– this scene was put in because this actor came into Huston’s office to read for a part, yet he couldn’t read, and just told him this same story.)

And that ending! Keach and Bridges are making small conversation at a coffee counter, while more of the fascinating Stockton population plays cards in the background. Keach turns around to watch the people milled around the card tables, and suddenly everyone is frozen! He realizes that this kind of life will not end, and that he cannot escape from it. Then the two men drink coffee in silence. Wow. Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night” is heard often throughout– it is the perfect melancholy soundtrack for this tremendously moving film. For my money, Fat City is one of the greatest American films– deeply affecting poetry about lower-class urban life that has seldom been equaled.

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Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #10 (“Summer in the 70s”).