Stacey Keach and Jeff Bridges look for a better life in and out of the ring in John Huston’s FAT CITY
FAT CITY (John Huston, 1972)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, January 1, 4:00, Sunday, January 4, 8:30, and Monday, January 5, 3:30
Festival runs through January 11
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
Genre master and onetime boxer John Huston returned to the ring in Fat City, a gritty 1972 drama about a group of has-beens and never-will-be’s struggling to survive in Stockton, California. Stacey Keach stars as Billy Tully, a down-on-his-luck fighter looking to make a comeback at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. He spars at the local Y with eighteen-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) and likes what he sees in the kid, telling him to meet his old manager, Ruben (Cheers’ Nicholas Colosanto), who decides to take on the unseasoned youngster. While Ruben lands Ernie — who seems more interested in bragging about having scored with his girlfriend, Faye (Candy Clark), than training properly — his first few bouts, Tully gets day work picking vegetables and hangs out at a local gin joint with a seedy, whiskey-voiced barfly named Oma (an Oscar-nominated Susan Tyrrell). Legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall, who shot such wide-ranging gems as Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and American Beauty, casts a gray pall over the proceedings as dashed hopes and dreams come falling down on these disillusioned perennial losers. In many ways Fat City, based on the novel by Leonard Gardner — who also wrote the screenplay — is an update of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, but moved to the hard times of early ’70s America, when so many people had no way out. You do not have to be a fight fan to fall in love with this film. A clear influence on such auteurs as Martin Scorsese, Fat City is screening January 1, 4, and 5 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Let There Be Light: The Films of John Huston,” which runs through January 11 and consists of forty films directed by Huston, in addition to a handful of other works he either appeared in or that demonstrate his lasting influence.