the audience applauded

Fresh and Exciting

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Jeff Bridges is young and charming in this movie about an upcoming boxer who meets another boxer (Stacey Keach) who is going down the drain. First I expected it to be a standard boxer movie portraying a young man who was going to make it big. But soon I discovered this movie was about losing. About drunks and has beens. Depressing. But not so depressing that it isnt great to watch Stacey Keach perform a drunk so well. Another actress got nominated for an oscar, but it should have been Stacey Keach who really deserved an oscar. Never seen an actor perform a drunk so well. Almost couldnt believe that Keach was actually acting sometimes, because he looks so wasted and completely lost.John Huston directed Fat City in a documentary kind of style. The photography resembles a real life look in the run down bars and boxing halls. Real life bums and poor people are being used as extras. It is depressing. Boring sometimes. But still fascinating because of its bleakness and so real life portrayals of everyday people.My only criticism of this movie is that there is a romantic subplot with a woman that kinda slows down the movie in the middle. There is definitely a lack of action in the middle. But hey, that is the life this drunk is leading. Nothing happens except for another night with booze. And another... And if you can stumach a movie about losers who are going nowhere than you can appreciate this movie as much as I did. Because the photography and the acting are way up there, really excellent. And the characters portrayed are loveable because of their vulnerabilities.

For a prize fighter, winning is everything, but if you're a loser when you climb into the ring, you're still going to be a loser when you come out, even if you KO your opponent. Such might be the moral of this very atypical sports movie, starring Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges as aspiring fighters in the lower echelons of the boxing game in and around Stockton, California.John Huston was one of the most commercially and popularly successful of mainstream Hollywood directors, making such major classics as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen, yet most film historians and critics have been reluctant to rank him among the best cinematic artists. Fat City makes it hard to see why: this gritty, realistic film is one of those great films which surprises you by how much more it seems like real life than like a movie. Keach and Bridges both give what may be their best performances, and Susan Tyrrell, an actress better known for stage work, gives an unforgettable performance as an alcoholic barfly, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, and she should have won.Fat City is not at all a typical sports film, which by Hollywood convention must show a hero overcoming early difficulties to rise to stardom, nor is it really about boxing, though it includes an extended fight scene which may be the best ever included in a Hollywood film -- the fact that Huston was a prize fighter himself in his youth no doubt adds to the authenticity of the prize ring atmosphere. But this is a film about people, very flawed people who manage to hold onto some shreds of integrity and to be kind to one another, despite the fact that they are all in their own desperate situation. The atmosphere of the seedy towns and endless fields of California's Central Valley, a rare location for major films, is portrayed with great vividness and accuracy.All in all, not a fun film, but an unforgettable one. The Sony Home Entertainment DVD is of acceptable quality, but this film really needs to be remastered and put on Blu-Ray.

When he wrote his only novel, 'Fat City' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), ex-boxer Leonard Gardner wrote about two things he knew intimately: his hometown of Stockton, California and the fight game. A taut, gripping tale of broken dreams, 'Fat City' won high praise from critics and fellow writers (e.g., Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion) and was nominated for the National Book Award. The book also attracted the attention of director John Huston. Amateur lightweight boxing champion of California in his youth and a life-long aficionado of the sport, Huston could truly appreciate the novel's authenticity and power. He purchased the screen rights, hired Gardner to covert his novel into a screenplay, and tried to interest Marlon Brando in playing the lead role (when Brando equivocated, Huston looked elsewhere.). Filmed on location in Stockton's skid row by Conrad Hall ('In Cold Blood'; 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'), 'Fat City' focuses on two small-time boxers, one just starting out and one at the end of his "career." In the latter category is Billy Tully (Stacey Keach), a thirty-year-old alcoholic has- been, eking out a living as a farm laborer, but unwilling to forsake his delusions of a boxing comeback. His sparring partner and protégé is Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), a 19-year-old with limited talent but big dreams. The characters and early plot trajectory point to a cliché Rocky-like underdog redemption story, i.e., after a slow start, Ernie, with Tully's expert tutoring, should steadily develop until he has a shot at the big time. But 'Fat City' is not "Hollywood"; Ernie is repeatedly pummeled in the ring and his career goes nowhere. Nor do Tully's fortunes improve. Egged on by his barfly girlfriend, Oma (Susan Tyrell), Tully wallows in drunken sloth, at least until a fight opportunity arranged by his longtime coach, Ruben (Nicholas Colasanto of later 'Cheers' fame), prompts him to get back in shape (temporarily). After a two-year hiatus, Tully does win a final victory in the ring but he wins against an already damaged opponent, movingly played by ex- light-heavyweight Sixto Rodriguez. Reminiscent of Rod Serling's 'Requiem For a Heavyweight' (1962) but less mannered and theatrical, 'Fat City' transcends the boxing genre, moves into the realm of genuine tragedy, and also stands as a scathing indictment of the inane vacuity of American Dream ideology, especially when it is pursued by society's downtrodden. Susan Tyrell's harrowing rendition of a drunken, demented floozy earned her an Oscar nomination. A final note: "Fat City" is jazz musicians' slang for an ideal life situation but athletes' slang for being overweight and out of shape: a title that perfectly captures the ironic distance between dream and reality. VHS (1994) and DVD (2002).

By the time John Huston made Fat City in 1972 his glory as one of the finest directors in Hollywood was fading. But this character study put him back up on top of the A list with the new breed of filmmakers of the period who were essentially going against the political core of the established movie-making industry.In Stockton California ex-boxer Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) takes a job as a day laborer to make ends meet and takes a break to go to the gym for a workout. When he meets young Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) and spars with him he is impressed with his natural boxing abilities. Tully sends Ernie to meet his former manager who takes the young boxer into his care for training. When Tully isn't working he hangs out in bars talking of his return to the ring. He meets Oma (Susan Tyrrell) in a bar and moves in with her and returns to his manager to train for another fight. Meanwhile Ernie settles down with a pregnant wife and continues to pursue his boxing and support his family. Through all the trials and tribulations each man learns that the value of his own life is a culmination of hard-earned small victories.The film is a study in the balance of styles, and characters, sometimes opposites, but always comparing one with another. Stacy Keach's washed up boxer Billy Tully is balanced against eager, youthful Jeff Bridges as Ernie Munger and in this comparison the filmmakers make a simple statement of how choices of occupations not only determine a man's character, but his fate as well.The women figures in the film are also designed around a symbolic fulcrum. The world weary Oma as played by Susan Tyrell could be the future or the opposite of Candy Clark's innocence loving Faye. Oma is resentful and intoxicated, whereas Faye is enlightened by her new-found knowledge of the relationship that can occur between man and woman.Each veteran boxer is introduced to the viewer lying down and coming to life as if resurrected from the dead. We first meet Tully rolling over in bed just looking for a light for his cigarette, and as he continues moving about into the world, gives up and just moves out of his rented room. Later we are introduced to the pro boxer, Sixto Rodriguez's Lucero moving up from a prone position to take some unidentified medication and appearing in the bathroom with medical troubles.Aside from the open-ended existentialism of the narrative, the cinematography by Conrad L. Hall which captures the natural light and urban landscape of the skid row area of Stockton Californiais worth the visit to this film. Many scenes of dialogue-less action feature merely the visual content of the world of small dreams and broken hopes.The look of the film recalls in many ways the canvasses of Edward Hopper with whole areas of light dedicated to details of the landscape and its weight on solitary human figures residing within the frame. Hall's work can be seen in classics such as Cool Hand Luke from 1967, the Oscar-winning films Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid from 1969, American Beauty from 1999, and the graphic-novel adaptation Road to Perdition from 2002. Hall is one of only six cinematographers to have his own star on the Hollywood walk of fame.The film was based on the boxing novel Fat City (1969) by Leonard Gardner, who penned the script for the movie. Virtually all the shooting was on location in a part of the skid row section of Stockton that doesn't exist anymore. Thus this movie is partly an historical document of the city and what it looked like before progress paved the way for a new highway and torn down many of the buildings.This film is one to return to again for the excellent direction, the great substantial acting and the beautiful cinematography. Cherish it as one of John Huston's best works.