Speaking to Lillian Ross, John Huston once described the film industry as “A closed-in, tight, frantically inbred and frantically competitive jungle”. It’s an apt description that could easily be applied to the world of amateur boxing that was the subject of Huston’s film Fat City (1972). The world of Fat City is the down trodden neighborhoods and bars of Stockton, California. Fat City is a jungle of false starts, dead-end dreams, and self-destruction.
The inhabitants of Fat City are the direct descendants of Fred C. Dobbs. These are two-time losers trying and failing to reclaim their lives and their agency from the clutches of thwarted ambitions. Huston always treasured the hard-luck losers. He found in their character a humanism and nobility that spoke to the American instinct for survival that saw this country through the Great Depression. Huston’s heroes are the stubborn schmuck’s who never quit but never really help themselves either.
The quietly devastating arc of Fat City is not dissimilar to the slow dance toward death of Under The Volcano (1984). In both films Huston focuses his lens on an insular subculture and latches onto a man paradoxically obsessed with second chances as well as his own destruction. But the death in Fat City is more subtle. It is the death of a dream, the death of youth. Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) looks around a Stockton dive bar and realizes he isn’t young anymore, that he has wasted his youth. It’s clear that Ernie (Jeff Bridges) is right where Billy was ten years ago. Then men form a closed circuit.
If Fat City is anything it’s a study of loss, of losing battles. It’s a boxing movie that never asks the viewer to rally behind its fighters. Instead it invites the audience to mourn their inevitable losses and see in them that human frailty athletes detest so much. None of the fighters in Fat City are great or even good. They’re competent and in their competency the fighters are merely average, mediocre. The romanticism of Rocky (1976) is utterly antithetical to John Huston’s Fat City in every way.
Kris Kristofferson’s haunting ballad “Help Me Make It Through The Night” underscores the weariness and self-defeat of Billy Tully. It’s an anthem for Huston’s view of Stockton’s boxing scene. The song epitomizes the inevitability of self-sabotage that is Tully’s modus operandi. The theme is played in various iterations as a theme for the downward turn of Tully’s life. It’s as hauntingly beautiful as Huston’s images of urban rot and decay.
All in all Fat City is one of John Huston’s greatest cinematic achievements. It’s an intimate character study that dispels American romanticism with its unglamorous look at boxing culture. Huston’s work in the seventies is often overshadowed by his early successes and films with Humphrey Bogart. But the films of the older Huston possess a rawness and emotional power rarely rivaled in the American cinema.
