Fat City (1972)

John Huston’s career had been in both the commercial and critical doldrums for years when he made Fat City in 1972. It was a surprise commercial hit and critics loved it. It put Huston back on top. Three years later Huston would make the best movie of his career, The Man Who Would Be King (1975).

Fat City is 1970s bleakness at its bleakest. This is nihilism without a trace of hope. The only movie of this period that can match it for bleakness is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but in that film the characters are driven to despair by economic desperation. It is set at the worst point of the Depression.

But Fat City is set in 1972. The 70s economic crisis was grim but it didn’t start until the Oil Crisis of late 1973. In 1972 the economy was going fine. If you were a loser in 1972 you couldn’t blame the economy. The characters in this movie are all losers and it’s all their own work.

The setting is Stockton, California. Huston and his cinematographer Conrad Hall make it look like an annexe of Hell. Everything is decaying, squalid, depressing and ugly.

Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) is a washed-out prizefighter. He was never much good but now at 30 he’s trying to make a comeback. In a gym he spars with 18-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Billy thinks the kid has promise. He introduces him to his manager, Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colasanto). Ernie is on his way.

But he isn’t really. He’s on his way in the world of third-rate semi-pro boxing. In this world if you win you still lose. Billy never even had a sniff at a title fight. He would always have remained in the sleazy desperate lower echelons of the fight game. He made some money for a while until he got so badly pummelled in a fight that he lost his mojo. If he makes a comeback he’ll be fighting for pitifully small purses in fleapit stadiums until inevitably he’ll get pummelled again and will end as another punch-drunk wreck. He just isn’t smart enough to avoid such a fate.

Ernie has some talent, but not enough. Not enough to get him anywhere near a championship fight. At best he will eke out a living until eventually he gets his brain turned to mush, just like all the other failed fighters. Ernie is also not smart enough to avoid such a fate.

And while Billy looks up to Ruben it’s an illusion. Ruben is the third-rate manager of a string of third-rate boxers. Ruben doesn’t have the training skills or the business acumen to develop anything but third-rate fighters. Ruben is a loser as well.

Billy drifts into a relationship with Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a broken-down self-pitying drunk. She has had three marriages. They all failed. It has never occurred to Oma that this might have been her fault. It has never occurred to Oma that anything has ever been her fault.

When we first see Oma we assume she’s around 40. But Susan Tyrrell was 26 at the time and I suspect Huston deliberately chose a young actress. If you look closely at Oma you can see that she isn’t 40, she’s a young woman who has let herself go to an extraordinary degree. Oma is the last woman in the world that Billy should get mixed up with, and Billy is last man in the world that Oma should become involved with. We know that the relationship will just make things worse for both of them but they’re both incapable of making good decisions.

Meanwhile Ernie has met Faye (Candy Clark). Very soon she has trapped him into marriage by deliberately becoming pregnant. She thinks it’s a clever move but they’re both too young and irresponsible for marriage and Ernie is in no financial position to support a wife and child. We know that the marriage will ruin both their lives, but they’re too dumb to know any better.

For me the weakness of this movie is that I found it difficult to care about people so determined to remain losers. They’re too dumb and too self-pitying to care about. But maybe that’s just me.

The performances are all effective.

There are two major boxing scenes and Huston does some clever misdirection in each of them. In one there’s some obvious foreshadowing but it doesn’t play out quite as he’s led us to believe it will. In the other we’re led to expect a particular result because that’s the way other boxing movies would play it but Huston pulls the rug from under us.

The ending is interesting. I saw it one way, others see it another way.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this movie but if you’re prepared to join Huston in a deep dive into despair and misery you can admire the skill with which he conducts us on that dive. Recommended, assuming you enjoy watching awful things happen to hopeless people.