Fat City

Huston drew on his own boxing experience from his youth to adapt Leonard Gardner’s cult novel about a handsome, mildly promising fighter (Jeff Bridges) and the older, alcoholic has-been (Stanley Keach) who bestows upon the young man all his curtailed dreams. A bleak movie about the weight of failure, sustained by a deeply intelligent screenplay and an unerring cast (many of them nonprofessionals), Fat City goes about its business with a mixture of deep tenderness and fixed resolve—and now stands as one of the indisputable masterpieces of Huston’s late career. The skid row of Stockton, California, where the film was shot, was torn down shortly after filming. “I wonder where all the poor devils who inhabited [it] have gone,” Huston later wondered. “They have to be somewhere.”