Tag: John Huston

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.

Victory (1981)

VICTORY

VICTORY (1981) Three stars
It’s hard to believe that any movie directed by the late John Huston (1906-87) and starring Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone could possibly be a “buried treasure,” but that’s definitely the case for 1981’s VICTORY in North America or ESCAPE TO VICTORY in international markets.

Huston, born in Nevada, Missouri, to actor Walter and sports editor Rhea (who gave up her career after her son was born), debuted with THE MALTESE FALCON in 1941 and his distinguished directorial career included THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, THE AFRICAN QUEEN, BEAT THE DEVIL, THE MISFITS, FAT CITY, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, WISE BLOOD, ANNIE, UNDER THE VOLCANO, PRIZZI’S HONOR, and his final movie, THE DEAD, in 1987.

Huston directed four more films after VICTORY.

Huston previously directed Caine in THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975) and Caine’s an actor who has persevered through many a bad movie during his nearly seven-decade career, including such epic disasters as THE SWARM, BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, BLAME IT ON RIO, and JAWS: THE REVENGE. (Caine did not accept his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for HANNAH AND HER SISTERS in person because he was making JAWS: THE REVENGE, a role for which he famously stated, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” Honestly, Caine gave a better performance in the 1984 Madness song “Michael Caine.”)

Stallone has mostly struggled outside the ROCKY and RAMBO franchises.

If you’ve seen THE GREAT ESCAPE, THE LONGEST YARD, and ROCKY, for example, then you’ve basically seen VICTORY, a movie built along similar lines except for it substitutes fútbol for football (THE LONGEST YARD) and boxing (ROCKY). It leads up to both a big game and the great escape from Nazis in the grand finale, and it features several training sequences as this ragtag group of war prisoners takes on the German national team in a propaganda soccer match.

Although VICTORY is a very predictable movie, it’s a rousing crowd pleaser just like THE GREAT ESCAPE, THE LONGEST YARD, and ROCKY before it.

You do feel good watching it.

Normally, action movies with an international cast (like VICTORY) bite the big one. Not here and it’s not your average international action spectacular cast.

Here, we have soccer players Pele from Brazil, Bobby Moore, Russell Osman, and Mike Summerbee from England, Osvaldo Ardiles from Argentina, Paul Van Himst from Belgium, Kazimierz Deyna from Poland, Co Prins from Holland, John Wark from Scotland, Soren Linsted from  Denmark, Halivar Thoresen from Norway, and Kevin O’Callaghan from Ireland.

That’s just the Allied team.

Caine and Stallone play soccer in the movie, although we can be thankful Caine used a double, professional football player Kevin Beattie. Paul Cooper’s credited for being Stallone’s double, although Stallone insisted on his own work during the big match.

Stallone initially blew off training from England’s World Cup winning goalkeeper Gordon Banks. In a 2015 interview, Pele talked about Stallone and the movie.

“When I got the first script I was a goalkeeper and Stallone was a forward,” Pele said. “I said, ‘Listen, I can’t play as a goalkeeper.’ When we started training for the film, we saw Stallone knew nothing about football. We teased him because he didn’t even know how to kick a ball. Michael Caine was my teacher. He’d call me over and say, ‘Pele, you must be more patient — this is a film, not reality.’ He was fantastic.”

Stallone dislocated a shoulder and broke his ribs a couple times during filming.

Ardiles said of the 47-year-old Caine and his physical and soccer abilities, “Awful, and he couldn’t even run 20 yards.”

Acting wise, though, Caine blows Stallone right off the screen in VICTORY and gets us more from the beginning to the end of the picture than his American counterpart.

Stallone’s not very good in VICTORY.

Apparently, Stallone antagonized cast and crew by eating by himself and flying off to either London or Paris every weekend on his private jet.

Also, Stallone reportedly insisted that he end the film on the note of a game-winning goal. “A game-winning goal from a goalkeeper?” Ridiculous.

That’s why the match ends on a penalty kick where, you guessed it, Stallone makes the save that saves the day.

In “Booked! The Gospel According to our Football Heroes” by John Smith and Dan Treifer, Wark talked about the film with much praise for Caine and the opposite for Stallone.

“Stallone was nowhere near as sociable. He and his entourage, which comprised several minders, were even booked into a different hotel.”

Wark touched on Stallone and a prisoner shower scene in the movie, “We spotted that Stallone preferred to wear a pair of mini briefs and all these years later I still can’t help wondering what ‘Rocky’ wanted to keep hidden from us.”

In the same book, it’s said by Pele that Stallone refused to allow anybody else to sit in his chair on the set and by Ardiles that it took Stallone at least 17 takes before he could make the save on the penalty kick.

You can bet the film’s writers took it all hard.

Yabo Yablonsky, one of two screenwriters and one of three credited for the story, apparently hated the revisions so much that he contemplated taking his own life upon seeing the finished project.

Stallone later made OVER THE TOP, that 1987 epic combining arm wrestling, child custody, and truck driving.

That brings us to a story involving Stallone and professional footballer Beattie.

Beattie told the East Anglian Daily Times in 2008, “We had finished for the day and I was at the bar with Russell Osman and John Wark and we were winding each other up. Somehow we started chatting about arm wrestling and there was a lot of laughing and joking.

“I was just sitting there and Stallone came over and asked if I’d like to give him an arm wrestle. I said, ‘By all means, no problem.’

“He had muscles on his muscles but I don’t remember him being that tall. I just thought I’d give it a go — I’d always been quite strong. Anyway, I ended up beating him and I don’t think he talked to me again for the rest of the film!

“Stallone got a bit of a shock but it’s a good claim to fame. I guess I was naturally strong. I used to carry the bags of coal for my dad and when I was at the gym at Portman Road, I was one of the only ones who could lift all the weights.”

I’d prefer footage of Beattie and Stallone arm wrestling in a bar over all of OVER THE TOP.

That’s because I take my arm wrestling without child custody and truck driving.