Fat City

Two men, barely 10 years apart in age, one with a lifetime of emptiness ahead of him, one with an empty lifetime already behind. This is what John Huston has to work with in Fat City and he treats it with a level, unsentimental honesty and makes it into one of his best films. Read full review

Fat City is both an extraordinarily realistic look at the bottom rungs of the fight game and a moving exploration of the human condition. Read full review

The movie’s bleak, but it’s funnier than most comedies, and it suggests that life’s toughness doesn’t preclude joyfulness. Read full review

Based on Leonard Gardner's California-set novel, full of brilliant low-key acting, accurate vernacular and precise low-life observation, it stars Stacy Keach as a nearly over-the-hill old pro and Jeff Bridges as a young pug starting out. [19 May 2006, p.C7]

From the script and novel of Leonard Gardner, this insider's portrait of the real world of the ring is a great tragicomedy: The bitterly funny, pugnacious banter between young alcoholic Oma (Susan Tyrrell) and Tully provides the humor; the lives of the fighters, whose hopes reach only to the next day, are its tragedy. [01 Apr 1988, p.29]

A different director might have fashioned the same basic material into something grandiose, but Huston errs on the side of understatement. Shot largely on location, this raw, pessimistic portrait of people struggling to keep from slipping all the way down reinvigorated the veteran director’s reputation, and stands as one of his best and most accomplished films. Read full review

Huston's affection for life's eccentrics, as well as its rejects and misfits, is Legendary—so much so that it has sometimes seemed as if he had cast his films as if running a mission. In Fat City he has kept himself under control. The result is one of the three or four most beautifully acted films seen so far this year. Read full review

A knockout scene by that grand old battler, John Huston. Read full review

Marvellous, grimly downbeat study of desperate lives and the escape routes people construct for themselves, stunningly shot by Conrad Hall. Read full review

Adapted from the Leonard Gardner novel, Fat City is long on character and short on plot (at times nearly playing like a Cassavettes film), but it's a crawl through the mud that'll stay in your psyche for days. Read full review

It’s one of those wonderfully depressing 1970s films that perfectly captures the era’s malaise. [29 Apr 2016, p.R19]

Huston catches the feel of the community with a lean, no-nonsense economy, a hard-boiled but humanly alert feeling which raises the tale from a purely naturalistic lowlife depiction of the characters to make a statement on the life style of the drifters and those who accept a moderate place in the smalltown hierarchy. Read full review

It is the script that made the difference here and that allowed Huston to make a better film than he had made in many years. Read full review

Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges and Susan Tyrrell are all superb in this downbeat boxing drama adapted by Leonard Gardner from his novel. Conrad Hall supplied the gorgeously stark cinematography. [16 Dec 2002, p.8]

John Huston's 1972 restatement of his theme of perpetual loss is intelligently understated, though the recessive camera compositions put an unnecessary distance between the viewer and the characters. Read full review

The film is beautifully acted and directed around the edges, but it also suffers from a tragic tone that has a blurring, antiquing effect. You watch all these losers losing, and you don't know why they're losing or why you're watching them.