Word: huston
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...SHORTCOMINGS of John Huston's Fat City notwithstanding: it is a movie that tries very hard to succeed. The dialogue is sensitively written. The acting is generally excellent, and Huston's direction has created a remarkably realistic film about people caught in a web of self-deception and defeat. Unfortunately the audience never becomes totally immersed in this world. Despite the thoughtful porrayal of virtually every major and minor character, weaknesses in the development of the plot dampen the overall impact of the picture...
...City. John Huston has cut the meat out of Leonard Gardner's fictional slice of the life of small-time boxers in Stockton, California. The characters are like the little people of Depression dramas--you see "em and weep, but they're just not complex enough to keep you interested. Huston's attempts at poetry are only intermittently effective. Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges are good. Susan Tyrell is terrible...
Married. John Huston, 66, grizzled director of movie classics (The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, The Treasure of Sierra Madre); and Celeste Shane, 31, his close and longtime friend; he for the fourth time, she for the second; in Los Angeles...
There was a time when John Huston understood such people and such desperation. A comparison between his evocative rendering of being on the bum in Tampico in The Treasure of Sierra Madre and the windbag theatrics of stumbling around Stockton, Calif., in Fat City is a measure of how careless an artist Huston has become. The movie is offhandedly shot, with none of Huston's old feeling for the look and the effluence of a place. Worse, he seems detached from his characters here, aloof and even slightly indifferent...
...Huston cannot wring a moment of pathos out of any of this, although there are fleeting moments of perception, as when a manager carelessly tosses a pair of newly bloodied trunks to another fighter, or when Tully stands in front of the mirror trying on some seedy clothes belonging to his girl's former lover. Hus ton also apparently abandoned his ac tors. Keach looks far too intelligent for the part. Although he does many tech nical things splendidly, he lacks emo tional force. Bridges, who was fine in The Last Picture Show, is at loose ends here...