Fat City

John Huston's Fat City (1972), a terse, funny, and unsentimental meditation on youth, marriage, and wine that played for a two-week run at the Film Forum this month, was at its roots a lover's elegy to all the lost dreams of the Stockton, California: the bars, the boxers, the migrant farm workers, the faded rooms, the peeling paint, the broken hopes. Stacey Keach starred as Billy Tully, an aging (30) and alcoholic man who once boxed against the 5th in line for the title. Based on the 1969 novel by Stockton-born Leonard Gardner, Huston took over production from Monte Hellman and directed one of his finest films, aided by the sunlit color cinematography of Conrad Hall (Cool Hand Luke) and by Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night" (taken from his 1970 album Kristofferson). Susan Tyrell was superb in an Oscar-nominated performance as Oma that was equally lighthearted and heartbreaking. Jeff Bridges and Candy Clark were featured as visions of Tully and Oma's idealized youth, while Curtis Cokes (as Earl), Sixto Rodriguez (as Lucero), and Nicholas Colasanto (as Ruben) gave the film depth and life from smaller roles. Fat City moved seamlessly across the San Joaquin Valley's world of migrant labor from the predawn allotment of jobs to the onion fields and walnut farms picked by black, Mexican, and Chinese laborers. The workers in these fields, like the young boxers in Ruben's gym, provided some of the best moments in the film. For Keach, who played Mike Hammer on CBS in the the 1980s and was excellent in The Killer Inside Me (1976), Billy Tully was a career-defining role.