John Huston (1972)

Leonard Gardner, author of the 1969 novel Fat City on which John Huston’s film is based (and for which Gardner wrote the screenplay), explained the title as ‘Negro [sic] slang.  When you say you want to go to Fat City, it means you want the good life’.  As might be expected, the title is ironic.  Huston and the cinematographer Conrad Hall convey this, economically and decisively, in an opening montage of shots:  shabby buildings, a rubbish dump, a gaggle of rundown men hanging around in the streets of Stockton, California – the title location.  These shots lead up to the introduction of the protagonist Billy Tully (Stacy Keach), lying on the bed of his gloomy rented room.  A bin next to the bed is chock-full of drink cans.  This prologue is accompanied by an instrumental of Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ (first featured on an album released in 1970).  As Billy half-heartedly gets up and gets ready to go out into the world, the tune is reprised, this time with Kristofferson’s vocals.  Fat City is Palookaville; we get the picture – so clearly that we wonder what else John Huston has to show us in the ninety-odd minutes to follow.

The answer is not the unexpected.  Tully, whose wife left him, is an ex-boxer with a drink problem.  He can’t hold down a regular job.  His attempts at a comeback in the ring repeatedly founder.  At the gym, he meets Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), an eager young eighteen-year-old.  Ernie looks a promising fighter but he loses his first two bouts and has to marry his girlfriend Faye (Candy Clark), when he gets her pregnant.  Tully also gets to know Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a world-weary barfly.  When her boyfriend Earl (Curtis Cokes) goes to prison, moves in with Oma but their relationship is soon in trouble.  Tully blames his former manager Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto) for screwing up his earlier boxing career.  When he eventually gets back in the ring and wins a fight, he earns just $100 after Ruben has taken expenses and the money he’s owed.  Angry and disappointed, Tully goes round to Oma’s apartment, only to find that Earl is back in residence after his time in jail.  We last meet Tully some time later; he runs into Ernie, who’s on his way home from his latest fight.  Tully is already plastered; Ernie, now a father, declines an invitation to go to a bar with him but agrees to have a coffee.  The film ends on a shot of them sitting side by side in a diner – in silence until Kris Kristofferson plays them out.

John Huston had had a string of box-office failures immediately before he made Fat City.  The movie did well commercially and very well critically – it was hailed as a welcome return to form for Huston and a tough, touching and truthful American Dream demolition job.  I’m glad to have got round to seeing the film at last though its description of the lives of ‘losers’ seems, at this long distance in time, dated.  The production designer was the great Richard Sylbert and the whole texture of Stockton and its environs that John Huston creates is highly convincing:  the skid row streets, the bars, the music on jukeboxes.  There’s eloquent social comment too in scenes in the surrounding countryside, where Tully and Ernie, to get badly needed cash, join migrant workers in seasonal work picking fruit and vegetables.  It’s the exceptionally believable physical context of the story that’s partly responsible, I think, for making the drama looked forced in comparison.

Some of the casting and acting is also responsible.  As Tully, Stacy Keach doesn’t suggest a boxer past or present; neither his body nor his movement is that of an athlete past his prime and struggling desperately to regain it.  When Tully eventually gets in the ring, the very credible look of his ageing, ailing opponent Lucero (Sixto Rodriguez) draws attention to how physically unconvincing Keach is in comparison.  (His disproportionately large head also seems a particular disadvantage for a boxer, presenting as it does a bigger target for brain-damaging punches.)  I guess that the Tully of the novel was an older man because Huston wanted Marlon Brando, who was then approaching fifty, for the role.  Keach was only thirty at the time although his face looks nearer forty.  (It’s therefore puzzling that Huston and Leonard Gardner go to the trouble of having Tully say at one point that he’ll be thirty in a few days’ time.)  Outside the gym and the ring, Stacy Keach gives a performance that’s conscientious but which I found monotonous:  it keeps reminding us how miserable Tully’s existence is without illuminating his feelings.

Susan Tyrrell overdoes Oma’s brittle lush wretchedness although there’s no denying she compels attention.  Nicholas Colasanto (later famous as the bartender Coach in Cheers) delivers Ruben’s lines in a superficially naturalistic way yet doesn’t seem inside the character; the same goes for Candy Clark as Faye.  The best work in the smaller roles is from Curtis Cokes as Earl – the first and (according to IMDB) only acting role of, ironically enough, a real-life former World Welterweight Champion.  Jeff Bridges made Fat City just after The Last Picture Show, when he was in his early twenties; as in Peter Bogdanovich’s film, he’s fully persuasive as a teenager.  His natural, expressive movement and readings put Bridges in a different league from the rest of the cast – and I don’t think this is simply the effect of seeing him in the light of the enduring screen career that followed.

In the final sequence in the diner, Ernie and Tully watch a dilapidated waiter of indeterminate age.  Ernie asks, ‘Think he was ever young once?’ and Tully replies, ‘No’.  The closing image of Tully’s and Ernie’s faces seems meant to suggest that they’re essentially interchangeable – that the older man was youthful and hopeful once, while the younger one will become no less curdled and hopeless in the fullness of time.  That isn’t what comes across, though.  Stacy Keach, like the waiter, was never young – in other words, he never hints at what Billy Tully used to be before his life went wrong.  Jeff Bridges’s Ernie Munger doesn’t seem bound to turn out like everyone else in the story.  That’s a relief, even if it’s not what John Huston intended.

1 March 2017