Return to Fat City

Our Artistic Director of Film, Jason Wood, revisits John Huston’s unflinching boxing drama, Fat City

After a series of critical and commercial flops, director John Huston came back with a vengeance with this grimly realistic look at the world of small-time boxers eking out a meagre living on the periphery of the sport. A story of perennial failure and the plasticity of the American dream, it’s also a potent portrait of the deadening realization that the pugilist’s lot is not money and success but booze, bankruptcy and beatings.

Billy Tully (a career best Stacey Keach) once had a promising boxing career. Now, at 29, he’s a hopeless drunkard. After sparring at the gym with Ernie (Jeff Bridges, fresh from The Last Picture Show), ten years his junior, Tully sends the talented hobby boxer to his former trainer Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto, Coach from Cheers), who arranges a few training bouts, all of which Ernie duly loses. By then, Tully has gotten a new taste for the ring, falsely believing that he just might have what it takes to be a contender. Increasingly unhappy in his relationship with fellow drinker Oma (an authentically soused Susan Tyrell, who earned an Academy Award nomination), he dares to attempt a comeback …

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Leonard Gardner, the despairing tone is set by the repetition of Kris Kristofferson’s melancholic Help me Make it Through the Night. Seeing in another morning is the possibly best that the film’s rag tag of drifters and bums can hope for. Fired by Huston’s fascination with underdogs and the director’s own youthful experiences in the ring, Fat City takes the viewer on a frills free tour of the grimy gyms, bars and flophouses of Stockton, California and the milieu peopled by the losers in the status race: the impoverished blacks, Latinos and whites. Shot by Conrad L. Hall (Cool Hand Luke, Electra Glide In Blue), the film brilliantly depicts a sport a million miles away from big bucks bouts, picking at the scab of a sub strata of American society for whom existence is the futile, sorrow-filled gaps that punctuate those moments between drinking and being drunk.

A determinedly downbeat work, the film never for a moment pours scorn on its characters and has a tremendous generosity of spirit, as evidenced by standout monologue where Tully talks himself into believing that he has unearthed a rough diamond in his new rookie associate. The sequence is played with a straight bat and watching it one is constantly reminded of the dictum (an abiding motto for West Ham fans) that ‘it’s the hope that kills you’. To my mind the best film ever made about boxing, narrowly edging out Raging Bull, Fat City also nestles alongside films such as Michael Ritche’s Prime Cut (1972) and Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974) as under-screened classics worthy of rediscovery. Presented in a 4K DCP restoration at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival, Huston’s film hasn’t been deemed worthy of an official reissue but we have decided to screen it anyway, giving Manchester audiences a very rare opportunity to sample it in all its ragged guts and glory on a big screen.

Fat City screens at HOME from Fri 3 June. Find out more and book tickets.

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