Fat City (1972)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Fat City (1972) – J. Huston

John Huston captures a feeling here, helped tremendously by Kris Kristofferson’s version of “Help Me Make It Through The Night” which plays over the opening credits and then lingers.  Yes, you’ve got it, this is a snatch of early 1970’s melancholia about down-and-out people going nowhere. Stacy Keach is a revelation as the has-been boxer at the center of the picture, falling in with drunk Susan Tyrrell (loose and sloshed) and encouraging impossibly young Jeff Bridges to take up fighting.  He’s deeply ambivalent about his dreams, probably realistically so, seeing that he’s screwed up too much – that last weird zoom shot tells a lot.  So over 90 minutes or so, we get a look at the flophouses, bars, fruit-picking operations, and of course boxing rings and gyms of Stockton, California, at its most run-down.  I’m hooked on this feeling.