Fat City (1972)
Directed by John Huston
The story of two men, a veteran boxer who is down and out, and a young man who is just starting his life and boxing career. Their fighting careers cross paths as their lives and fortunes head in opposite directions.
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What critics compared Fat City to
With a sober humanism reminiscent of John Huston’s Fat City , The Wrestler poignantly submerges itself in the nooks and crannies of sports’ minor leagues, even as its traditional narrative arc—Randy risks life and limb for autumnal glory, woos Cassidy, and, in the film’s clunkiest subplot, reconnects with estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood)—pushes slightly too hard with Christ-like undertones that imagine Randy sacrificing himself for our sinful entertainment.
Gritty, blue-collar US sports films were a genre unto themselves in the 1970s, from John Huston's 1972 boxing melodrama Fat City to Sylvester Stallone's 1976 breakthrough role in Rocky and the vastly underrated hockey flick Slap Shot with Paul Newman in 1977.
Aronofsky and writer Robert D. Siegel obviously know John Huston's Fat City (1972), which is one of my favorite sports films The Wrestler, though not as stellar, has much in common with it.
The pathos of personal ruin is an established trope, and the trick, as demonstrated by John Huston in “Fat City” and by Martin Scorsese in “Raging Bull,” is to stop it from sliding into the sentimental.
Eminem may make the best music contribution to a boxing movie since Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night" in John Huston's Fat City (1972).
He’s thrilling to watch and the only unpredictable thing in a two-hours-plus movie where you can count on one hand the number of moments that aren’t hand-me-downs from better boxing films like Rocky, Raging Bull, and Fat City.
Stacy Keach fights physical and emotional gravity to stay on his feet in Huston’s Fat City .
As a boxing movie, this is every bit as grim as The Set-Up (1949) and Fat City (1972), and as an underlit look at a seedy American subculture, set mainly in a few lairlike locations, it's as dark and doom ridden as the 1961 The Hustler (with which it paradoxically shares a 'Scope format) and Eastwood's own Bird (1988).
The characters and dialogue bob and weave between Fat City authenticity, Rocky blue-collar romanticism and movie-of-the-week contrivance as the film pokes at the underbelly of society.
The best boxing movies—Robert Rossen’s “Body and Soul” (1947), John Huston’s “Fat City” (1972), Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” (1980)—have a special redolence that is as easily recognizable, and as richly satisfying, as the leather-and-manure aroma of a stable.
"Fight Club's" wrestling and bare-fisted cold-cocking owe more in their visceral matter-of-factness to the quiet, but awful violence in John Huston 's "Fat City," a film about fighting's futility, whose dark, somber interiors Fincher and production designer / underworld-specialist Alex McDowell have hyperbolized into a tragic kingdom that looks like New York and L.A. in a storm cloud.
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"Hell or High Water" harks back to 1970s elegies for the Old West: "The Last Picture Show," "Fat City," "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot."