Tag: Creedence Clearwater Revival

Fat City (1972)

FAT CITY

FAT CITY (1972) ****

I would not be surprised if writer and director John Huston (1906-87) had the nickname “The Great Adapter.”

Huston directed 37 feature films from 1941 through 1987 and his films adapted from works by Dashiell Hammett, Ellen Glasgow, Robert Carson, B. Traven, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sylvester, W.R. Burnett, Stephen Crane, C.S. Forester, Pierre LaMure, Claud Cockburn, Herman Melville, Charles Shaw, Romain Gary, Alan LeMay, Philip McDonald, Tennessee Williams, the Book of Genesis, Carson McCullers, Ian Fleming, David Haggart, Hans Koningsberger, Noel Behn, Leonard Gardner, Desmond Bagley, Rudyard Kipling, Flannery O’Conner, Zoltan Fabri, Harold Gray, Malcolm Lowry, Richard Condon, and James Joyce.

Huston co-wrote some of those adaptations, but it was Gardner himself who adapted his own novel, “Fat City,” for the big screen.

In a 2019 interview with the Paris Review, celebrating the 50th anniversary of his novel, Gardner spoke about Huston and the film adaptation.

“Before I started to write it (the screenplay), he invited me to come over to his place in Ireland for a couple of weeks for a discussion about how it was going to go,” Gardner said. “He was a funny guy. He trusted me, I think, because we didn’t talk all day about the script. We talked maybe a half an hour. Then he wanted to paint. He was always painting.

“He’d been an amateur boxer. It was lucky because my objection to boxing movies back then was that they were all the same. It’s a fixed fight and the hero won’t take a dive and maybe they break his hands afterward. I thought there needed to be a boxing film done another way. He was all for it.”

FAT CITY set itself within the city of Stockton, California, population over 100,000 at the time of the making of the film. The scenes are played out in skid row bars, restaurants and living spaces, work on a migrant labor farm, bowling alleys, a boxing gym, and boxing venues in a gritty, street-level fashion. Huston and Gardner definitely created a boxing film that’s done another way.

Stockton, now with a population above 300,000, received a dubious recognition from Forbes Magazine in 2012: “The Most Miserable City in the U.S.”

“I think that this is such a rough place that people who are highly educated use it as a springboard to get jobs in other places, and what it leaves behind is not the cream of the crop. The really smart people don’t want to stay here. They don’t want to be here with the violence and the crime and everything,” said substitute teacher Ronald Schwartz in a story for PBS News Hour.

So things only seemed to get worse in Stockton since 1972.

Creedence Clearwater Revival released the song “Lodi” as the B-side to “Bad Moon Rising,” the lead single from their third album “Green River,” in April 1969. Farrar, Straus & Giroux published “Fat City” in 1969.

Lodi is approximately 15-20 miles north of Stockton.

Creedence songwriter John Fogerty has said that he picked Lodi because it had the coolest-sounding name. The song’s refrain “Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again” has truly stuck with Lodi for more than 50 years, unfairly or not.

FAT CITY utilizes Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and the lyrics and the way Kristofferson sings them suit FAT CITY perfectly. Kristofferson said that he got his inspiration for the song from an interview with Frank Sinatra, who said “Booze, broads, or a bible … whatever helps me make it through the night.”

Any of the characters in FAT CITY could have said that.

We follow two boxers in FAT CITY: 29-year-old Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) and 18-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Tully meets Ernie in a Stockton gym, sees potential in the young man after they spar, and encourages him to get into the fight game. Tully recommends manager and trainer Ruben (the great character actor Nicholas Colasanto).

Keach and Bridges play off or against each other perfectly. Bridges, in his early 20s and on his fifth feature overall, fits the part of a promising up-and-coming talent like a glove; Bridges had already received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW. Keach’s own struggles to get a part like Billy Tully infuses his characterization of a washed-up boxer clawing and scratching (and drinking) his way through life; for example, Mike Nichols fired Keach from CATCH-22 a week into rehearsals. Keach’s propensity for overacting and Bridges’ for underacting factored in.

“FAT CITY is a good film,” Keach said in Dennis Brown’s “Actors Talk: Profiles and Stories from the Acting Trade,” “but 20 minutes were cut. Twenty minutes longer, FAT CITY is a great film, a classic. Unfortunately, 20 minutes longer made it 20 minutes more depressing.”

A theory: All good films are not depressing and all bad films are.

Boxing takes Ernie away from the pressures of a young wife (Candy Clark) and the start of a nuclear family. Tully, a shell of himself since his wife left him and since his defeat in the ring in Panama City, takes up with Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a character described as a “woozy boozy floozy” in the New York Times. Booze initially lubricates their relationship, of course, but it fizzles out spectacularly down the home stretch.

Tully tells Oma “You can count on me!” so many times that you wonder if he’s attempting to get himself to believe that more than even this woman.

Code of Silence (1985)

CODE OF SILENCE

CODE OF SILENCE (1985) Three-and-a-half stars

CODE OF SILENCE and LONE WOLF McQUADE are the best Chuck Norris movies.

They are the ones for people who otherwise grunt and groan at the possibility of watching a Chuck Norris movie. You know, individuals who go, “Ugh, I don’t like Chuck Norris, his movies are so dumb and stupid. They’re ridiculous and redneck.” Then, there’s other people who only want to watch Norris on “Walker, Texas Ranger” re-runs 24 hours a day 365 days a year because they have little tolerance for movie violence and vulgarity.

Let’s get a few things straight: I don’t especially care for Norris’ ultra-conservative politics (he predicted 1,000 years of darkness if Obama won a second term). I hate those darn infomercials that he did with Christie Brinkley plugging exercise machines. I cannot stand “Walker, Texas Ranger,” except for when clips were used for the “Walker, Texas Ranger Lever” on Conan O’Brien. I hate that he sued “Chuck Norris Facts” author Ian Specter because “Mr. Norris is known as an upright citizen to whom God, country, and values are of paramount importance” and “Mr. Norris also is concerned that the book may conflict with his personal values and thereby tarnish his image and cause him significant personal embarrassment.” I often dislike the use of slow motion in many Norris pictures, like, for example, at the end of A FORCE OF ONE and I cannot decide if that ridiculous echoed voice-over in THE OCTAGON is the worst or the funniest thing I have ever heard. Finding all his voice-overs compiled into a 4-minute, 20-second YouTube video, I vote for the latter. I will one day write a review of THE OCTAGON in the style of that voice-over; I remember Richard Meltzer’s review of the Creedence album PENDULUM with a built-in echo. For whatever reason, Norris’ inner monologues in THE OCTAGON call to mind Ted Striker’s cockpit moment when he hears echo and Manny Mota pinch-hitting for Pedro Borbon. THE OCTAGON voice-over is even funnier than the one in AIRPLANE! I understand that I like watching old Norris movies for their camp and nostalgic value. I’d rather watch one than listen to a Ted Nugent album (or song). I apologize for (possibly) coming on so defensive about Carlos.

In the pantheon of action stars, Norris rates below Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. He’s never made a movie quite at the level of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, THE GREAT ESCAPE, DRUNKEN MASTER, ENTER THE DRAGON, the first two TERMINATOR movies, and ROCKY. Norris belongs in the second tier of action stars.

Back to CODE OF SILENCE (and LONE WOLF McQUADE).

Both movies have good supporting casts — for example, CODE OF SILENCE surrounds Norris with quality character actors like Henry Silva, Bert Remsen, Dennis Farina (before he became a full-time actor), Ralph Foody, Ron Dean, and Joseph F. Kosala.

Andrew Davis directed CODE OF SILENCE, his first action picture, and his later credits include ABOVE THE LAW, THE PACKAGE, UNDER SIEGE, THE FUGITIVE, CHAIN REACTION, and COLLATERAL DAMAGE. THE FUGITIVE, one of the best films of 1993, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and good old grizzled Tommy Lee Jones won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He’s a good director, certainly the best of any Norris movie.

At this point in his career, Norris wanted to distance himself somewhat from his karate and become a more polished, all-purpose action star. If all his subsequent movies were more like CODE OF SILENCE, he would have been onto something, but, alas, Norris returned to third- and fourth-rate product like FIREWALKER and MISSING IN ACTION III before finding his greatest commercial success on TV.

In CODE OF SILENCE, Norris plays Chicago policeman Eddie Cusack, who finds himself in the middle of a gang war all while he’s alienated himself from his fellow officers (barring one, his former partner) for breaking the “code of silence” by standing and testifying lone wolf like against a veteran officer (Foody) accused of killing an unarmed teenager.

Norris enlists Prowler on his side for the final confrontation, Prowler a police robot with a tremendous arsenal that kills bad guys good.

We do see one particularly rare scene in any Norris movie: He gets knocked around real good by a group of thugs. That’s not happened often to Norris since he took on Bruce Lee late in WAY OF THE DRAGON.

Between his work in CODE OF SILENCE, ABOVE THE LAW, and THE FUGITIVE, Davis showed himself to be a master of scenes involving the ‘L,’ Chicago’s elevated train rapid transit system that we have seen on many films and shows. There’s a chase and fight scene on top of the ‘L’ in CODE OF SILENCE that belongs with Norris’ flying kick through a windshield in GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK and driving his super-charged Dodge Ramcharger out of the grave in LONE WOLF McQUADE as the best Norris moments.