Fat City (film)
Fat City is a 1972 American sports drama film directed and produced by John Huston, and adapted by Leonard Gardner from his 1969 novel of the same title.Billy Tully, a boxer past his prime, goes to a gym in Stockton, California, to get back into shape and spars with Ernie Munger, an 18-year-old he meets there.Art Aragon (Babe) was a former top lightweight contender, and Curtis Cokes (Earl) was the simultaneous WBA, WBC and The Ring World Welterweight Champion,[4] though ironically his character isn't a boxer.After a string of box office flops, John Huston rebounded with this film, which opened to tremendous praise and good business, and he was soon in demand for more work.Ebert wrote, "[Huston] treats [the story] with a level, unsentimental honesty and makes it into one of his best films...[and] the movie's edges are filled with small, perfect character performances."[10] Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader wrote, "John Huston's 1972 restatement of his theme of perpetual loss is intelligently understated."[11] Film critic Dennis Schwartz wrote, "The downbeat sports drama is a marvelous understated character study of the marginalized leading desperate lives, where they have left themselves no palpable way out.The site's consensus reads: "Fat City is a bleak, mordant, slice of life boxing drama that doesn't pull its punches".[16] Wins Nominations Under the then-extant rules, Stacy Keach should have been awarded Best Actor from the New York Film Critics Circle for his portrayal of Tully because it required only a plurality of the vote.A vocal faction of the NYFCC, dismayed by the rather low percentage of votes that would have given Keach the award, successfully demanded a rule change so that the winner would have to obtain a majority.In subsequent balloting, Keach failed to win a majority of the vote, and he lost ground to the performance of Marlon Brando in The Godfather.