Stay Hungry

Stay Hungry begins as a dreamy meditation on a rich kid’s arrested development in steamy Birmingham. Jeff Bridges plays Craig Blake with that particular brand of wealthy ennui he perfected in the ’70s. His parents are dead. His mansion feels like a mausoleum. He’s killing time with a real estate scheme that requires buying out a downtown gym.

Then he meets the gym’s receptionist Mary, played by Sally Field, and a charismatic bodybuilder named Joe Santo. The bodybuilder is played by someone named Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he’s magnetic. Every scene he’s in crackles with easy confidence and that impossible grin.

For two-thirds of its running time, Stay Hungry luxuriates in the kind of hangout atmosphere director Bob Rafelson mastered in Five Easy Pieces. We get lakeside parties where Field and Bridges actually seem to be doing their own water-skiing. We visit a rural jamboree where Schwarzenegger—who knew?—plays fiddle. These moments feel lived-in, authentic.

Rafelson contrasts this genuine connection with Craig’s stuffy country club crowd, all posturing and ogling. The film seems to be building toward something meaningful about class, authenticity, responsibility, and the changing New South.

Then something breaks. In a single cut, Craig transforms from lovably lost to obnoxiously drunk and grabby. Bridges plays the transition well—he’s always been a gifted drunk—but it feels unearned. As if screenwriter Charles Gaines suddenly remembered he needed conflict and cranked the drama dial to eleven.

The finale is pure tonal whiplash. In one scene Mary’s sexually assaulted, in another we get the bizarre spectacle of bodybuilders in posing trunks racing through Birmingham streets. They literally stop to flex while fiddle music plays. It’s simultaneously absurd and deeply uncomfortable, like someone mixed Deliverance with a Charles Atlas ad.

A shame, as Stay Hungry had all the pieces for something memorable. Field, barely twenty, holds her own against more experienced actors with pure authenticity. The supporting cast—Robert Englund, Joe Spinell, R.G. Armstrong—brings real texture to their roles. And Schwarzenegger announces himself as a screen presence worth watching. Even the finale’s absurdity could have worked with appropriately cartoonish stakes instead of attempted rape.

There’s a great hangout movie buried in here, one that trusts its characters enough to let them simply exist. Instead, we get a film that loses its nerve and tries to become something it was never meant to be. Sometimes the best stories are the ones that resist being stories at all.