DVD Andrew Nickolds
ANDREW NICKOLDS FAT CITY Director John Huston, 1972, Powerhouse Films 97 minutes
Leonard Gardner’s novel was published when he was 26, before he turned it into a screenplay for John Huston’s film of the same name. It takes its title from the elation itinerant workers express after earning a few dollars picking onions and asparagus, or shaking walnuts down from trees in the farms surrounding Stockton, a dingy small town in California.
The town itself, seen in an opening montage to the strains of Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’, is a succession of Skid Rows, with one of the few escape routes being via the boxing ring.
Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) was a promising fighter until his eyes were cut (illegally, by a razor blade concealed in the glove) during a bout in Panama. His trainer Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto) had sent him there, being too tight with money to make the trip himself.
Now the wrong side of thirty, Tully drags himself from his boozy bed and goes to the gym where he meets eighteenyear old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), as keen to make it in the ring as Tully once was. As they spar, Tully recognises Munger’s raw talent and sends him to see Ruben, before heading for the nearest bar: there he falls in with the raucous ‘juice-head’ Oma (Susan Tyrrell), as she abuses her hapless boyfriend Earl (Curtis
Cokes). When Earl goes to jail, Tully moves in with Oma and tries to get her off the drink, cooking for her while getting fit himself (thanks in part to all the fruit and veg picking). Oma is violently ungrateful for the steak and peas Tully puts on the table, but he now has a plan: ‘I get the fight, I get the money – I send for my (ex-)wife.’ He’s reconciled with Ruben who, impressed with Tully’s dedication, gets him another fight, against the ageing Mexican Lucero (Sixto Rodriguez) – well over the hill, blood in his urine, etc, but still a draw.
Meanwhile, Ernie Munger is pursuing a hit-and-miss career to feed his wife (Candy Clark) and new baby. After Tully’s fight, he bumps into Munger and the two sit in a café, ruminating on the defeated old man behind the counter who serves them coffee.
Fat City is about as far from a Hollywood-fairytale boxing picture as it’s possible to be; certainly far from the likes of Rocky and its redundant sequels, which came along a few years later. Its strongest scenes are in bars and crummy apartments rather than the ring. As John Huston put it, ‘It’s about life running down the sink before you can put the plug in.’ Which before this magnificent return to form was what looked as if it was happening to Huston’s own career. Since The Bible in 1966, he’d directed a string of duds (though The Kremlin Letter does at least offer the spectacle of George Sanders in drag). Fat City itself didn’t do much at the box office either but, looked at again 45 years later, its quality is apparent on every level – despite practically the only official recognition being Susan Tyrrell’s Oscar nomination for her extraordinary Oma.
But all the performances are spot-on: Curtis Cokes and Sixto Rodriguez, former boxers both, poignantly display dignity and a resignation to their situations in equal measure; Jeff Bridges, already on a roll after Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, brought a vulnerability (described by the drunken Tully as ‘A guy who is soft in the centre’) to Ernie Munger. Bridges then starred in the similarly neglected western Bad Company and has remained an ‘actors’ actor’ ever since.
As Tully’s trainer – also soft in the centre – Nicholas Colasanto put years of directing TV episodes behind him, finally settling behind the bar as the dim-witted and much-loved Coach in the series Cheers. Fat City’s author, Leonard Gardner – now in his eighties and interviewed on this newly restored DVD – found a niche in television, too, writing and producing several series of NYPD Blue in the 1990s. And Stacy Keach (recently memorable as a sinister curmudgeon in Nebraska) is probably best known as the voice of the owner of the Duff Brewery in The Simpsons. To order the DVD for £19.99 including UK p&p, call 0844 848 2000, quoting The Oldie and offer code 180470.