FAT CITY (87)

Directed by: John Huston (1972)

Starring: Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrrell

The Pitch: Two small-time boxers cross paths in a small Californian town - one an unambitious young man just starting out, the other a self-destructive ex-champ heading for the skids.

Theo Sez: There's such a wonderful sanity to Huston's work - his boxing movie really shows up RAGING BULL for the macho adolescent fantasy that it is. As a film about boxers it's perhaps second only to THE SET-UP, but it's not just a film about boxers : it's this director's favourite theme (from THE ASPHALT JUNGLE to WISE BLOOD), losers and small-timers living on the fringe of society - what you might call the flipside of the American Dream, though it's not particular to America (it's just that the dark appeal of self-destructiveness is so much more poignant in a culture that so ceaselessly exhorts self-improvement). There's undoubtedly something a mite self-conscious to its relentlessly downbeat tone, wasted-looking characters propping up bars as Kris Kristofferson sings "Help Me Make It Through The Night" on the soundtrack, but there's honesty in the details - the manager's almost pathetic boosterism, the tender-sarcastic way Tyrrell's jailbird lover tries to excuse her impossible behaviour by blaming "her unhappy life and all that shit" - and a compassion to its equable, sympathetic tone that just blows you away (especially if you see Huston - as I do, for reasons too manifold to go into here - as the greatest of American film-makers). A single highlight by way of example - the minor character of the aged Mexican boxer who comes up from Mexico City to fight our equally aged hero. He's on screen for about ten minutes and never says a word : we see him arriving, snappily-dressed, at the bus station ; we see him in his hotel room before the fight - he urinates blood, his kidneys are all shot to hell ; we see the fight itself, in real time, our hero realising his opponent is vulnerable "downstairs" and - after a long, hard fight - finally pummelling him into submission ; and we see him again finally - just a glimpse, a five-second shot - after the fight, when the lights are dimming and the crowds have long since departed, back in his snappy duds on his way back to Mexico, leaving the film as noiseless and dignified as when he entered it - only a loser, and a step closer to an excruciating death (but it's the nature of the job - and he probably has a wife and a passel of kids to support). It's tragedy seen through the corner of the eye ; it's pure poetry.