Tag: Frank Sinatra

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.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

DAY 81, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) Four stars
John Frankenheimer’s political thriller is one ripped, twisted movie, borrowing famous words from Hunter S. Thompson.

It should make one reconsider both Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, for example.

I did.

Before I first watched THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, I held Sinatra in very little (miniscule) esteem. Maybe it was Phil Hartman’s savage impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” Maybe it was Sinatra’s appearances on Jerry Lewis’ MDA telethon on Labor Day and when you only have three channels and one of them’s gone all weekend, all booked up, man, we’re talking about Pits City. Maybe it was his crooning that provided the soundtrack for seemingly innocuous yuppie consumption (we all know what seemingly innocuous really means) and little old swooning ladies and every movie that wants to evoke a certain mood just by slapping one of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ standards on every few minutes. Maybe it was the fact that he lived and breathed crusty, old guard establishment, whose reactions to Elvis and the Beatles were not surprising. There was just something about that man that gave me the creeps.

Why, of course, like any child of the 1980s and 1990s, I knew Lansbury from “Murder, She Wrote” and I know I saw her in old Disney entertainments somewhere along the line. I knew that she wasn’t quite this doddering old lady, because, man, if I saw her Jessica Fletcher coming my way, I would have moved to another town or put a down payment on a passport and an one-way plane ticket and move to another country because I know that homicide’s afoot and I want no damn part of it. The homicide rate in Cabot Cove, Maine, must have rivaled Chicago.

So, yeah, in many different ways, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE warped my fragile little mind, including seeing Sinatra as a legitimate dramatic actor and Lansbury as the most wicked mother in screen history. I have no doubt she plays the most wicked mother in screen history, because I don’t want to see anybody else more wicked.

I don’t know if reading or having somebody tell you the plot summary for THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE can even adequately convey how messed up the movie’s events are, like this one I just read on the Internets: “Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco (Sinatra), finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and, together with fellow soldier Allen Melvin (James Edwards), races to uncover a terrible plot.”

Strange nightmares, you can say that again, because they incorporate those Communist brainwashing sessions.

It seems that Shaw’s platoon are surrounded by sweet little old ladies, when in fact they are Chinese and Soviet officials performing their brainwashing routine. Shaw murders two of his men, one by strangulation and one by gunshot through the head. Yet when they come back home, Shaw’s a military hero, just all part of the plan.

These nightmares are very disturbing to watch, of course, and establish the movie’s disorienting tone. We rarely catch a break.

This was one dark movie for 1962 and like DR. STRANGELOVE (1964), it holds up today because of that darkness. In her 1962 review, Pauline Kael said that it may be the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood. Here we are, decades later, and her statement holds true.

There’s a lot about the plot I don’t want to consider in this space, but there’s still a lot one can discuss considering THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.

For example, it was released October 24, 1962, right in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis during which Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached their coldest.

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE builds up to an assassination.)

For over two decades, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE became withdrawn from circulation.

Some believe it was because JFK’s assassination had such a toll on Sinatra that he sat on the film.

Apparently, Sinatra had made such a poor deal with United Artists on the film that his attorneys planned for Sinatra to buy the movie’s rights himself and bury his mistake. Sinatra’s plan succeeded in 1972.

Eventually, though, the New York Film Festival organized a 25th anniversary screening of the movie in 1987 and its success led to a theatrical re-release in 1988. Apparently, Sinatra got a better deal this second time. We all got a better deal when THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE saw the light of day once again.

The film’s tagline certainly gets at the truth of the matter: “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about! When you’ve seen it all, you’ll swear there’s never been anything like it!”