MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

lasttimeisaw Glancing with a documentary eye, John Huston's FAT CITY opens with Kris Kristofferson's lugubrious HELP ME MAKE IT THROUGH THE NIGHT to accommodate to a downbeat tonality, and concomitantly fills the screen with montages of the story's locale and denizens, a rundown California town called Stockton in the 50s, and then introduces Billy Tully (a cleft-lipped and hair- receding Keach), a divorced, childless peckerwood and former boxer on the brink of turning 30, doing odd jobs from hand to mouth, he aspires to return to the ring, but both physically and mentally he hasn't been conditioned to reclaim his glory. Meantime, a young stud Ernie Munger (Bridges), recommended by Billy, starts his professional boxing days but is he really the "one in a million" material which Billy sees in him? The script is penned by the author of its source novel, Leonard Gardner, which warrants fidelity to a large extent but also leans more on Billy than Ernie in the narrative. The boxing scenes, to the lights of a pugilism outsider, are less vicarious and impactful than its more famed cinematic cousins and sometimes one can discern they are playacting, both Keach and Bridges are not toned up in a pro's shape, but that might be the case here, Billy is over the hill, and the allusive reason behind his hard-earned victory is more due to his opponent's deteriorating health than his own prowess. As for Ernie, he loses both two matches presented on-screen and has a soft belly which both literally and metaphorically implies that he is a younger version of Billy, getting married out of onus rather than love, the road ahead of him looks glum, and it speaks volumes in the final close- up where the two boxers sitting sipping their coffee in concert but inside they are miles away from each other (Billy is a lush Ernie tries to avoid), without obvious effort of fumbling for words, that silent moment could be the only time they share before parting company for keeps, no matter how similar their trajectories will be, both Keach and Bridges (at a tender age of 23) are extraordinary players of conveying connotations and embodying nuances. A boisterous Susan Tyrell snatches an Oscar nomination for her terrific turn as Oma, a barfly who strikes a romantic relationship with Billy, but she is a damaged goods through and through, married twice before, habitually drenched in the hard stuff, Billy might be merely a fling to her while her current lover is in the jug. The two-handers between them are coruscating with sheer communion (in the seedy bar where they engages themselves from small talk to wearing their affectionate hearts on their sleeves), or blistering intensity (in their equally mangy bedsit where Huston pulls off the most kitchen-sink spat in the American map), she is an attainable lure for a rough diamond like Billy, but she will do him no good, and the vicious circle will never cease to repeat, time and again, because loneliness brings people together but it takes a helluva luck to be able to stick together.In a word, FAT CITY is on the top rung of Huston's corpus, a strangely disconsolate but whole- heartedly candid social critique of the stagnation and cul-de-sac facing by the have-nots, bestowed with a sublimely subdued texture with unobtrusive dexterity, but as a boxing drama, it still looks rough-hewn and conspicuously pulls its punches in terms of veracity.

Writer_Mario_Biondi This is a magnificent movie. Simply magnificent. With a very simple, minimalistic plot John Huston succeeds in creating a story which you can not abandon and on the contrary await avidly to see scene after scene. And, let alone the extraordinary direction (and photography: only a shadowy hint of Edward Hopper, where one risked to have tons of it), the magic is done by the actors. All, all, all of them, but particularly (and obviously) Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges and Susan Tyrrell. This last one is simply fantastic in her portrayal of the desperate, solipsist boozing woman. Bridgse is my favorite actor after Dustin Hoffman, but I had never seen him so young and yet a perfectly accomplished actor. And Keach… well, tell me I am dumb, but I didn't even know him. When I look at a DVD I like to stop near the middle and begin again from that point the day after. So, with this movie I spent two splendid evenings. Depressing movie, I read somewhere. No, no way. I will look at it again

me-justaman I tried to hang in there looking for the great movie everybody was saying it was, but I couldn't sit through it.Every scene is so poorly written, the dialog is forced and give absolutely no sense of realism; sometimes it actually doesn't even make sens at all : trying to stick the most information in the dialog of one scene, ending up with plain ridicule. the scenes structure is all very muddy. really untalented storytelling all over. As for the direction of John Huston, it feels like he just had the camera rolling without even reading the script or paying attention to what the actors were doing. A prolific director, now i see at what price. John Huston is an overrated director who seem to have gotten away with plain bad film making. it is a consensus.this movie has A LOT of boxing scenes. Jeff Bridges looks pathetically ridicule as he pretend to box, he looks like a nerdy and feminine teenager who hasn't even seen a boxing match in his life, and should be studying computer science (well not in 1971 i guess!). he is so badly directed that he ends up being simply annoying. if John Huston doesn't do his job, Jeff Bridges could have at least taken a basic training to prepare for this movie. And once again, John Huston shoot the boxing scenes with absolutely no interest for quality, story, emotion or action.A beautiful story about losers (probably a great book), potential for a great drama, wasted by amateur scriptwriting (a book writer is not necessarily a script writer), a director who obviously doesn't make no effort, and ridiculous boxing scenes as Jeff bridges makes a fool of himself.to like this movie is to be very indulgent toward cinema and be satisfied with amateurish, bad film making.

jzappa Fat City is something extraordinary, alive with the sort of dialogue that movies ordinarily can't offer, that characterizes time, place, atmosphere, individual, while apparently not progressing. Nobody's ever able to say just what's on their mind or, if they do, to acknowledge it. "Is it my fault that you can't fit in?" shouts Oma at her black lover in the middle of her declarations of love for him in a packed bar. At other times, the characters exchange truisms as earnestly as marriage vows.For awhile, Huston had been dabbling with movies like he wasn't emotionally invested. Both an extremely realistic glimpse at the basement steps of the fight game and a poignant study of the human situation, this shows us the legendary director working with his time-honored diligence but without resort to either the laughable or sensationalistic props that had seemed to distance the director from his then-recent films, as if to deflect any true feelings. This shrewd, humanist magnum opus is too teeming of soul to be as utterly dismal as it sounds. Negativity and hopefulness are irrelevant to the sympathy articulated in Gardner's screenplay devoid of melodrama or masturbatory philosophizing.Two men, hardly a decade apart in age, one with a life of meaninglessness ahead of him, one with meaningless life already behind. This is what John Huston has to use in this astutely low-key story of unending loss and he handles it with a horizontal, hard-bitten frankness and makes it into one of his preeminent works. The young man is one of those unflappable, strapping youngsters who appear to be replete with vigor as teenagers. Then you come across them after a couple years and they're clerking a register and daydreaming. The older man was a boxer some time ago, and came close enough to distinction to be troubled by it now as a transient. Huston's muted study of despairing lives and the escape paths people create for themselves, strikingly shot by the great Conrad Hall, sets these men in Stockton and stands the despair of their lives against the single-minded perseverance of their hopefulness.The Stockton in his film is present in an America we have a propensity to put out of our minds about the more the divide grows between rich and poor. It is the rival of the image favored by boards of trade or business networks. The characters live their lives in discolored flats with screen doors that pound with the current. They interact in the sort of bar that promotes in its window the charge for a shot and a beer. They get it in their blood that they'll need a phenomenon to improve their existence, since they know truly that they don't have potential. So they fantasize, and put confidence in outside chances. Even after all the hours of keeping fit and pump-up sessions, the boxers in Huston's thirtieth film feel little belief in themselves. They exchange big talk for buoyancy.Huston's boxers are Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges. Keach plays Tully, whose boxing career is long past, though he extraordinarily pulls himself together for one last conquest. Bridges plays Ernie, who never even has what Tully lost. He does have a sturdy body, some good steps, but mostly he's a sucker. Huston tells his tale in a lingering, moody way, and characters waft into it and remain as they have nothing else to do. There's Oma, a distended lush, who comes by Tully while her lover is doing time. She's thick, loutish and all the other things we suppose about people who never had an education and imbibe cream sherry all day. But she has a spirit, and she trusts in all the immature chestnuts that do her for a viewpoint.While Bridges' scenes with his girlfriend are stunningly commonplace, the scenes between Keach and Tyrrell are imbued with an enthralling theatrical realism as close to the inimitable dialogue scenes in Cassavetes films as anything I've seen.Faith is vital to these people since there's nothing else, not even the understanding of faith. Consider Ruben, who oversees the local gym, manages fighters and sponsors sessions when he can. He's aged and penniless and in a fading business, yet when fresh meat drifts into the gym, he gets that old butterfly in the belly. He takes his boxers over to the next town for a fight, and returns them when they've lost, incessantly talking about Madison Square Garden.The movie's boundaries are teeming with minor, faultless character performances. Candy Clark is defenseless and blankly buoyant as Bridges' young, pregnant wife. She's used some inbred shrewdness to ensnare him into marriage, barely foreseeing what a dismal future she's securing for herself by working him prudently toward a proposal by making him feel like a total clown. Curtis Cokes as Oma's lover has a self-worth that won't submit to distrust. He treats Tully with mano-e-mano respect.The one performance in the movie I'm certain I will never put behind me comes from Sixto Rodriguez, an actor who doesn't speak one line. He plays a Mexican boxer, who once, momentarily, had repute, and comes in by bus to fight Tully. He comes to the stadium contained by a cosmic stillness and solitude. He pees blood, and we recognize his skeleton in the cupboard. He's in such agony he can hardly stand. But he goes out and fights.