Fat City - Pulling No Punches

(John Huston, 1972) 

Whenever you hear someone telling people about the great run of films America made in the early 1970's, and they get to the list, and they begin to feel fatigue, just wait for a pause and say "And Fat City.  John Huston's Fat City."  At that point the kids frown, and they admit they've not even seen Fat City.  "Right," you say, "and you never even heard of "Fat City"
                                        David Thompson - Have You Seen?

I love the quote above for two reasons, one it highlights the thrill of finding those gems that may have escaped the praise, adulation and fawning bestowed upon their contemporaries and two it demonstrates that no matter how far you dig, no matter how much you watch, there is always something out there to challenge your perspective of a previously held belief.  Cinema is simply more diverse, thrilling and robust than any canonical list or critic's all-time top ten would have you believe and as a cinephile the discovery that film extends beyond those hallowed chosen ones is a wonderful thing in itself.

So, take Fat City for instance, a little gritty boxing movie by a director that most believed had seen better days, adapted from a book which was pretty downbeat with no discernible happy ending, add to the mix the young bucks (Bogdanovitch, Friedkin, Speilberg, Penn, Altman, Ashby, Scorcese, Coppola etc) now re-shaping Hollywood in their own idiom and in hindsight it really shouldn't have worked so clearly as it did.  Essentially a story of two boxers, Billy Tully (Stacey Keach) once a contender now is steep decline and Ernie Munger (a young, puppy dog faced Jeff Bridges) with his career going in the opposite direction, Fat City is character driven, following the parallel lives of Billy and Ernie as they take their separate paths and their continuous attempts to carve some sort of meaning out of their lives.

Jeff Bridges (Ernie) in the ring

Fat City is the hope, the American Dream, and Billy having tasted it is now a shell of a man; drunk, day-dreaming, unable to hold on to a job with sentences going unfinished yet still believing he can attain those long gone glory days - the perfect Huston protagonist, Ernie has his world in front of him but who's to say that in the world Huston paints he'll turn into Keach before the decade is out. The world of boxing showcased here isn't the glorious Rocky-esque vaudeville act or the stylistic ballets of Scorsese's Raging Bull, boxing is shown for what it is, a slugger match, up close and shed of heroics or style, two men hitting the other but truly damaging themselves.   The desperation of our characters to forge a world out of this devastating sport is the crux of Huston's direction, the vacant broken faces and broken aspirations at the whim of a cut eye, a bloody nose and age are all too prescient. On skid row you scrap for your living and taking a beating for some money, for the basics to live, is one hell of a brutish metaphor.

The fact is 'Fat City' is a city of the walking wounded, all are beaten before they enter the ring,  right down to the trainer Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto) believing he's finally spotted the 'next great thing' in boxing to Susan Tyrell's scene stealing whirlwind as the bloated Oma, a wreck of a human being, red faced and beaten down, life has dealt her one too many jokers and she's no longer playing cards. Jeff Bridges adds another notch to those roles of blank-faced young men in which the world and it's worries seem to play no part (think The Last Picture Show - in fact it's almost as if Duane has basically packed in Texas for a life in the ring) yet even he can't escape Fat City's harsh realities, accidentally making his girlfriend pregnant and having to marry at a young age, in turn giving up any dreams for a world of mind numbing work.

 Stacey Keach (Billy) and Susan Tyrell (Oma)

Looking as it reads, Fat City, beautifully photographed by Conrad Hall, feels like a world in despair, the city covered in a film of hopelessness, a place where dreams go to die. Authenticity is key, Huston surrounded the actors in boxers and real fighters, throwing them into the ring at certain intervals to keep the whole thing looking real, there's a sense that Bridges and Keach are actually fighting for real in parts.  There's real insight to a world on skid row, nothing is blown out of proportion or for strict dramatic purposes, action is low key and dialogue sometimes lengthy or stilted, there are no 'I could have been a contender' soliloquies, albeit a few tall stories, just a quiet understanding that life has zipped by and left you with nothing.  Keach is the key here, his face looks battered, a fragile giant akin to letting himself dream now and again about what he had, what he could have had and what he could achieve; the whole film could be told with just one still of that magnificent broken man. You never believe he can make it, although you hope he will, but the apathy is such that those scenes in the fields picking fruit for next to no money seem to be the limit of his possibility and ambition.

Apathy, giving in and a sort of unrealised acceptance permeates throughout Fat City,  it's not so much that our characters fight against the life dealt out to them but how much they accept their fate without so much as a whimper that really devastates.  Life in Fat City is harsh and through Oma's bitter rants at all those around her, Ernie's blank expression and Billy's refusal to accept he's past it, it has a way of grinding you down and keeping you compliant.  Like much of that golden period in American Cinema and despite the harsh realities on show, Fat City is so watchable and rewarding it knocks most, if not all, modern American independent filmmaking out of the ball-park.  Take for instance the infamous last scene, see the scene below, where the world stops for one moment of drunken clarity, where everything futile makes sense but resolves nothing for our protagonists, who would take such a risk these days?  Cinema seems far less brave now.

    'Maybe we're all happy'

Not long before the infamous climax we witness two old workhorses, Billy and, an out of town old pro, Lucero (Sixto Rodriguez, a former boxing champion), going at one another for the gratification of a baying crowd, both of whom are aware at some level of the absurdity and hopelessness of their predicament.  Mirroring Billy's infamous 'Panama story' - in which he claims to have been cheated out of a great destiny in boxing despite evidence to the contrary, Lucero travels to California all alone, pissing blood and looking as if he would rather be anywhere but here, desperate for the cash.  Their fight scene is one of the most humiliating of all boxing matches ever caught on camera and for what?  Exit right, Billy makes $100, Lucero, maybe more but not much, exits the arena in the dark as the lights are turned off before he leaves.  Fat City has built to that moment any yet it's almost too horrifying to watch, at one point we are shown an extreme close up of Billy's bloody eye, staring vacantly into the ring, whilst his corner go about stopping the blood, and he goes on waiting in silence, waiting for the pummeling to start again.