Fat City

John Huston boxed as a young man. You can tell. Fat City has the smell of the gym on it—not the choreographed sweat of most boxing pictures, but the real stink. Stale mats, mildew, liniment. This is not a movie about winning.

Stacy Keach plays Billy Tully, a twenty-nine-year-old ex-prospect in Stockton, California, whose only bouts these days are with the bottle. He wanders into the YMCA, spars with a kid named Ernie Munger, played by Jeff Bridges, and is startled to learn the kid has never fought. Billy sends the kid to his old manager. It’s the most generous thing Billy does in the film, and possibly the cruelest.

The manager is Ruben Luna, played by Nicholas Colasanto with the weathered patience of a man who has seen a hundred Billy Tullys walk through his door. Colasanto feels less like an actor than a fixture Huston found at the gym and pointed a camera at. Ruben takes Ernie on. Ernie gets his nose broken in his first fight. There is a cut from the ring to Ruben and his boys sitting wordlessly in a dark bar. That single cut tells you the result, the mood, and the future.

The structure is a wheel. Ernie climbs while Billy slides. Billy picks fruit. Then Ernie picks fruit beside him, because a girl got pregnant and guilt got him to a courthouse. You watch them in the fields together and understand: Ernie is not on a different road. He is on the same road, a few miles back. The movie never underlines this. It doesn’t need to.

Everyone in Fat City is trapped in a cycle. Ruben keeps finding the next great white hope and keeps losing him. Billy’s opponent, Lucero, is an aging Mexican fighter who risks his failing body because he can still draw the migrant crowds. Oma, a barfly Billy moves in with, lives from one drink to the next. The setting itself seems caught in a spiral. Stockton looks worn through, a city running on fumes. Conrad Hall photographs the flophouses and dive bars in dim yellow light that gives everything the tint of a photograph already fading. The film exists out of time—men wear hats and drive old cars, but Bread plays on the radio and someone mentions the draft.

Keach is extraordinary. He was thirty-one when this was shot, but he looks forty. Watch him a decade later playing Mike Hammer on television and notice, somehow, he looks younger. The sloping forehead, the nose that appears to have been reset more than once, the scars above his eyes that seem to sharpen and blur depending on the light. He plays drunk, sober, hopeful, ruined, and every station between. It never once feels like acting. It feels like a man disintegrating in real time. He deserved an Oscar nomination. He didn’t get one.

Susan Tyrrell did. She was nominated for Oma, and she convinces as a loud, sloppy barfly desperate for attention. But the performance has one setting. Every scene is a showpiece of the same showpiece. We needed a scene of Oma slightly more sober—not reformed, just human enough to show us why Billy, still on his first drink of the evening, might walk toward her instead of away. Maybe those scenes were shot and cut. If so, it was a mistake. As it stands, Oma grates. She is the drunk you avoid at the bar, not the one who draws you in. It is the film’s major flaw.

Huston was sixty-five when he made this. He directed it with the confidence of a man who knows that if the people are real, the camera can simply watch. He trusts silences. He trusts faces. Which is why the surreal sequence at the end is a puzzling misstep. Billy, stumbling drunk, runs into Ernie on the street. They sit for coffee. Billy looks around the room and the other patrons freeze as the soundtrack goes silent. It is a reach for an exclamation point. The film has been speaking in quiet, declarative sentences for ninety minutes; it doesn’t need one. Keach’s face is enough. It always has been.

That said, Fat City is easier to admire than enjoy. Tyrrell’s shrill performance and Huston’s forced profundity mar what should be one of the great sad American films of the 1970s. It offers no redemption, no training montage, no triumphant final bell. Billy wins his comeback fight and rages when his cut comes to a hundred dollars. That’s the victory. That’s all there is. The title is slang for easy street, the place every character believes is just around the next corner. None of them will ever get there. Some of them know it.