Hollow Men

Fat City 1972 U.S. (100 minutes) directed by John Huston; screenplay by Leonard Gardner, based on Gardner’s 1969 novel of the same title; cinematography by Conrad L. Hall; editing by Walter Thompson.

This is a beautiful, gutsy boxing picture made with a documentary touch at a moment when the chattering classes predicted the sunset of the American Dream and the imminent decline of Great America.

No, not last week.

Set in Stockton, California, in the hot, flat depressed inland from the Bay Area, John Huston’s classic Fat City takes place early in the economically painful 1970s in a country waking up in the rust belt to the cream sherry hangover of the 1960s, an unwinnable Asian war, and an ‘imperial presidency’ about to implode in disgrace.

The film’s overture is an opening series of shots that make for a photo essay of Stockton’s former Depression-era skid row, a human-scale yesterday of old storefronts and phantom advertising on brick walls slowly being bulldozed to make way for a modern freeway. The human subjects are mostly middle-aged or elderly black and Latino residents going about their lives, here and there a derelict. 

Several minutes of well-composed shots roll by to the sound of Kris Kristofferson strumming his hit ‘Help Me Make It through the Night.’ The camera finds a man waking up in his bed in a single room occupancy hotel, hungover and rooting around his empty pints for a cigarette. Kristofferson’s voice picks up his plaintive lyrics as the opening credits begin.

The man is Billy Tully (Stacy Keach). Billy is a has-been 29-year-old boxer who tells himself he is going to quit drinking, get back into shape, give his stalled ring career a fresh shot. To paraphrase a popular slogan of the day, today is the first day of the rest of his life.

We eventually find out that after promising beginnings and a taste of the big time, Billy got married; the ‘good life’ led to drinking, and drinking ended up losing Billy his career and his wife.

Step one is to get himself to a gym.

At a YMCA, Billy meets and spars with a nice-looking, energetic younger guy who has good moves and, Billy says, might have a shot at the big time. Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) tells Billy he never boxed before; Billy encourages Ernie to look up his former manager Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colasanto) at the Lido Gym where Billy once worked out.

‘I know I saw you fight before,’ Ernie says, going out the door.

‘Did I win?’                                                                                   

‘Naw,’ Ernie admits.

What follows is a classic boxing story based on Leonard Gardner’s 1969 novel of the same title with the screenplay by the author.

John Huston’s direction and Conrad L. Hall’s cinematography go a long way to make this a great movie.

Huston’s work, beginning with his first film, The Maltese Falcon (1941), is well known. Hall shot 1967’s Cool Hand Luke and In Cold Blood; he won an Academy Award for his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He later picked up Oscars for his cinematography in American Beauty (1999) and Road to Perdition (2002).

But what really holds together this well-made boxing story is its diverse and terrific cast. Keach carries the picture. He makes a compelling portrait of a friendless, unlikable, self-destructive, hard-luck bastard. The likable Bridges is Keach’s natural foil as ‘the kid,’ though a kid who just as well could end up like Billy.

Two music selections nicely dovetail Billy’s and Ernie’s characters with the characters of the women in their lives in the period mood and atmosphere.

Billy first meets Susan Tyrrell’s Oma in a bar with her boyfriend Earl. Billy later runs into Oma alone in the same place to Dusty Springfield’s cover of Burt Bacharach’s popular ‘The Look of Love’ after Earl goes to jail for assault. Oma is ‘single’ again and their boozy back-and-forth both captures and parodies the feeling of the song.

The young Tyrrell does an entertaining and remarkable job as a saucy, self-destructive barfly who proves to be an irresistible magnet for Billy. Her work earned her an Academy Award nomination for a Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1973. (This was the year of The Godfather.)

Elsewhere, and as though a million miles away, Ernie’s Faye (Candy Clark) moodily intimates that they need to discuss Something Important one rainy night when they are out alone together in his car. An instrumental cover of Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ plays softly on the radio in the background. When Ernie figures out what Faye is trying to tell him, he says he thought they had ‘been pretty careful.’

‘If I was careful, I wouldn’t have come out here in the first place,’ Faye replies.

The movie is filled with beautifully written, well-played small moments that give it a steady pulse of authenticity, such as Ruben sitting up in bed at night, telling his wife about the new kid at gym, and then realizing she is already asleep.

Huston notably gave the picture a natural grain by putting then-current and former boxers in the secondary roles. He portrays professional boxing as a tough way to make a living, but without editorializing; he appreciates that men choose this profession and often remain in boxing as trainers and managers. Huston’s boxers seem in many cases to be natural actors.

Among the actual boxers is Oma’s non-boxer boyfriend Earl, played by Curtis Cokes, a world welterweight champion in the late 1960s. When Oma first introduces them at the bar, she tells Earl that Billy is ‘a fighter.’ ‘Oh really,’ is all Earl replies.

Ruben’s assistant Babe is Art Aragon, a professional lightweight boxer in the post-World War II era known as ‘The Golden Boy.’ Billy and Ernie’s teammates in Ruben’s stable, Wes (Billy Walker), Buford (Wayne Mahan), and Fuentes (Ruben Navarro), all were current fighters at the time.

The light heavyweight professional boxer Sixto Rodriguez played Arcadio Lucero, the ailing Mexican fighter whom Billy beats in a key comeback bout. According to Keach, Rodriguez actually knocked him out on the shoot and his knock-out punch appears in the film.

Huston also used ‘real people’ when he put Billy, and later, Billy and Ernie, in fields harvesting onions and gathering walnuts to earn extra money. Billy struggles to keep up with workers methodically digging, trimming and bagging onions a handful at a time and rhythmically hoeing weeds; Huston gets good mileage out of the workers’ backchat and stories.

The final scene is a lyrical passage similar to the coda of HBO’s The Sopranos. As with Tony Soprano, it is not hard to tell that Billy is probably not headed for a good end—though not with a bang, but a whimper.