Leonard Gardner was just 25 years old when his first and only novel, “Fat City,” was published in 1969. A terse yet compassionate tale of struggling fighters attempting to escape their dead-end lives through the boxing rings of Stockton, California, the book was acclaimed by critics and fellow writers alike, including Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates. Soon after publication, the rights were purchased by the independent Hollywood producer Ray Stark, with the author retained to write the screenplay. Monte Hellman, best known for 1971’s cult classic Two-Lane Blacktop, was initially lined up to direct the film before contractual disputes led to his replacement with John Huston.
At the time, studio-system veteran Huston must have appeared to be a strangely old-fashioned choice for the project. Although Huston had made his name with literary adaptations such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), his larger-than-life persona and position as Hollywood royalty would not initially suggest a natural affinity with Gardner’s downbeat world of drab hotels, menial jobs, and crushed hopes. In addition, by the early 1970s his powers seemed to be on the wane, with his recent films struggling to find significant critical or box office favour.
Presumably sensitive to such concerns, the versatile Huston brilliantly adapted his style to take a near documentary approach to Fat City, successfully leading to something of a renaissance period in the director’s long career. Armed with Conrad Hall’s rich, naturalistic cinematography and Gardner’s sharply observed script, the film achieves a sense of realism so convincing that the atmosphere is redolent with woozy heat, stale sweat, and quiet desperation. The tone is established beautifully by the grimly authentic opening montage, filmed entirely on location in Stockton itself: a dusty aerial view of the city gives way to visions of derelict, desiccated buildings and boards promising renewal and redevelopment projects. The down-at-heel inhabitants linger in the street next to signs reading ‘No Loitering,’ and the dustbin emblazoned with the slogan ‘Keep our City Clean’ overflows, as though everybody were long past caring in the face of such entrenched disrepair. The only victors in this desolate battleground seem to be the bulldozers driving over the endless hills of demolished debris.
We first meet Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) lying alone on a flea-bitten bed in a threadbare hotel room, surrounded by empty bottles and cautiously contemplating movement. When he wanders down to the gym and encounters 18-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) working out, the stage seems set for a sea of sporting cliches: the washed-up has-been getting a second chance, the promising youngster learning from the battle-hardened old-timer. The subtle camera angle makes the barren gym resemble a shabby secular church, pale light filtering through its high windows, with Ernie’s position in the foreground of the frame turning his punchbag into a makeshift altar. As Tully moves behind him at the back of the shot, only his shadow remains visible, briefly linking the two like a warning written on the wall between the generations.
Yet the film resolutely refuses to indulge in the sentimental fantasy or manipulative heroics of better-known boxing movies like John G. Avildsen’s Rocky (1976) or The Champ (filmed twice, by King Vidor in 1931 and Franco Zeffirelli in 1979). As Keach observed in a 2015 interview with The Film Stage: “The characters start at point A and end up at point A.” Ernie recognises the older boxer, having seen him fight previously, but when Tully hopefully asks if he won, the answer is bluntly negative. Their brief sparring session leads to a pulled muscle for Tully, who returns to drowning his sorrows, trying to convince himself that only bad fortune has prevented his return to shape, rather than his growing self-disgust and alcoholism. Ernie still takes the old pro’s advice and meets his former manager Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto), but it soon becomes painfully clear that he is not the “natural” the two older men long to discover. In a brutal edit, the film cuts from Ernie proudly trying on his new boxing robe in the mirror to him removing it in the ring to fight; before his assistant Babe (Art Aragon) has even put it down and turned back to watch, Ernie is being knocked out cold. Another grimly funny scene pits Ruben’s delusionally encouraging patter at a post-bout meal against the resentful, swollen faces of his assorted younger charges, every one of them beaten and crushed by their relentless defeats.
Fat City goes even further in its despair than previous cynical boxing film noirs such as Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947) and Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949). While their fighting leads are ruthlessly exploited by capitalist gangsters, even criminals are uninterested in the terminal underdogs of Huston’s film. The hair-raisingly casual discussions of their past injuries between ex-boxers Ruben and Babe make it clear that permanent physical damage is far more likely than riches or acclaim. The one fight Tully does win is miserably attritional, beating his unwell opponent Lucero (Sixto Rodriguez) by pounding his inflamed kidneys. The camerawork in the ring is intimate and claustrophobic, without even the punishingly stylish brutality of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), instead emphasising the sheer physical toll the bout takes on the two out-of-shape boxers. By its end, the dazed Tully simply murmurs “Did I get knocked out?”, unaware of his own victory, and his barely-grasped moment of glory soon fades as his downward trajectory continues.
If all of this makes boxing seem unappealing, the film makes clear that the poorly-paid menial jobs available to the leads are just as crushing and destructive in their own insidious way. Trying to subsidise their meagre existence as fighters, Ernie and Tully become two more worn-out faces in the sea of desperate people hustling each day for back-breaking work as farm labourers. Exploited for a pittance without even the slender chance of glory offered by the ring, their only other alternative seems to be to join the destitute wanderers on the street, awaiting the bulldozer.
While most sports movies choose to concentrate on the noble winner returning to righteous glory, Fat City turns a compassionate eye to the losers at the sharp end of the American Dream. In some ways, the film is not really about boxing at all; rather, it is about the lost and vulnerable trying their best to succeed only to find that, as Tully succinctly puts it, “Before you get rolling, your life makes a beeline for the drain.” The film’s titular destination remains hopelessly out of reach for its flawed but very human protagonists, whose plight is observed unsentimentally but never with condescension or sanctimonious judgement.
Perhaps inevitably, the lack of opportunity and hope leads Ernie and Tully to make poor choices in their personal lives. Ernie’s relationship with Faye (Candy Clark) leads to marriage and children, but both seem to fall into it through miscommunication and naivety rather than any real passion or love. Their first scene together shows their car stuck in the mud following a tepid back-seat encounter, suggesting that their union is destined to go nowhere much, and their eventual domesticity seems dully satisfactory at best. The divorced Tully meanwhile pursues a doomed relationship with the alcoholic Oma (an astonishing, mercurial Susan Tyrell), while her partner Earl (Curtis Cokes) is in prison.
The 10-minute scene in which Tully first picks up Oma is one of the highlights of the film. Their drunken conversation turns on a hairpin from maudlin consolation to bitter quarrel to tentative romantic attachment. Keach and Tyrell’s performances are so skilfully judged and natural that they barely seem to be acting, and the long takes make the scene feel improvised, although the dialogue nearly matches Gardner’s novel verbatim. This sense of lived-in realism permeates every aspect of the film and is the key to its success, ensuring that the story remains involving and moving despite its bleak, low-key tone. Small, haunting moments abound: Ruben’s wife quietly drifting off to sleep as he enthuses about his new fighters, lulled into slumber by his tired old dreams; Lucero’s lonely arrival and his solitary departure, heartbreakingly dignified even in defeat; the resigned sympathy in Earl’s eyes as he closes the door in Tully’s face.
Although Fat City has endured more as a critical favourite than as a mainstream success, its influence has arguably reached far beyond its relatively small audience. The aforementioned Rocky is essentially an optimistic twist on the same ingredients, while Clint Eastwood’s 2004 Million Dollar Baby and Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 The Wrestler strike a similarly downbeat tone. Fat City’s greatest impact however has probably been in terms of style; along with other 1970s classics such as Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973), its watchful, intimate, character-driven approach has bled into the work of many US indie cinema auteurs, from Jim Jarmusch to Kelly Reichardt. A masterclass in performance, detail, and penetrating observation, Fat City deserves to find a far wider audience and is ripe for rediscovery.
