Fat City

Before:
All My Life
Bruce Baillie. US, 1966, 16mm, color, 3 min

Stacy Keach as a burnt-out, heavy-drinking minor league boxer who discovers an up-and-coming, younger alter ego in Jeff Bridges on the desolation row of Stockton, California, whom he supports for a time. Percussive poetry of getting hammered. A story of constant loss, staged with moving laconicism, unobtrusively but superbly played by Keach (melancholic), Bridges (uncouth) and Susan Tyrrell (a highlight in her long-term role as a drunkard), while cameraman Conrad L. Hall deep into the no man's land of smoky bars and sun-bleached streets. With its proximity to countercultural loser ballads (on the soundtrack: Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night"), Fat City became one of ex-boxer John Huston's great critical successes - the strongest and most rigorous work of his sensational 70s -Filmography. Before that, Bruce Baillie's image (and sound) poem All My Life, a magical miniature set to a song by Ella Fitzgerald. (Christoph Huber)

* Many thanks to Andrea Glawogger, who, together with Michael Glawogger, made the acquisition of this film possible for the Film Museum collection as part of the “Film Sponsorship” project.

Photo: Austrian Film Museum