Fat City (Huston, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12pm
This film, which also screens on April 27th, is part of the season devoted to boxing films at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here.
John Huston is much better known for The Dead, African Queen and The
Maltese Falcon but Fat City is surely, along with Wise Blood (1979), his finest work. Don't miss the
chance to see a rare screening of this wonderful slice of Hollywood
melancholia in which Stacy Keach gives the performance of a lifetime as a
struggling boxer giving it one last try and Jeff Bridges shines as a
naive up-and-coming fighter. Watch out, in particular, for the final scene
of this movie and an audacious, haunting shot a minute from the end.
Time Out review:
Marvellous, grimly downbeat study of desperate lives and the escape routes people construct for themselves, stunningly shot by Conrad Hall.
The setting is Stockton, California, a dreary wasteland of smoky bars
and sunbleached streets where the lives of two boxers briefly meet, one
on the way up, one on the way down. Neither, you sense instantly, for
all their talk of past successes and future glories, will ever know any
other world than the back-street gymnasiums and cheap boxing-rings
where battered trainers and managers exchange confidences about their
ailments, disappointments and dreams, and where in a sad and sobering
climax two sick men beat each other half to death for a few dollars and a
pint of glory. John Huston directs with the same puritanical rigour he
brought to Wise Blood. Beautifully summed up by Paul Taylor as a
"masterpiece of skid row poetry".
Tom Milne
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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