I’d very much like to like John Huston’s new film, and, to judge by many of the reviews, so would a lot of other people. It makes a nice story with a happy ending were Huston, after all these years of wandering in the Continental wilderness, to return to the American scene and the world of those down-and-outers who populate his early films, and to create a work which is the earlier films’ equal; but wishing won’t make it so. And I like The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle too much to want to say they are no better than Fat City.

Not that Fat City hasn’t some virtues of its own, the virtues, if somewhat diminished, of the Leonard Gardner novel which its author has adapted to the screen. By and large the film seems truthful, in a dogged, journalistic way, in its depiction of its seedy milieu of the fringes of professional prize fighting in Stockton, California, on a level so impoverished that a single pair of bloodied trunks is passed on from a boxer who’s left the ring to another about to enter. And the two principal characters, an alcoholic fighter trying for a comeback after a year-and-a-half off, and a young protégé of his just starting out in a career that seems no more promising, are knowingly drawn and played. (The older fighter wins his comeback bout against an opponent who, unknown to him, is physically ill—“Did I get knocked out?” he asks dazedly after his victory—but, immediately after, he slips back into alcoholic disintegration.) Yet somehow it all isn’t as good as it should be. After a nice pre-credit montage of the Stockton setting, one starts to wonder what became of it. In the main role of the older boxer, Stacy Keach gives an intelligently worked out performance, but fails to hold the screen as a Brando (who was Huston’s first choice for the part) could; nature isn’t fair in its selection of movie actors—handsomeness certainly isn’t the issue—and, to judge from the few film appearances of his I’ve seen, it may be that Stacy Reach’s talents really aren’t well-served by the camera. Conrad Hall’s characteristically tricky photography—with its fancy focal adjustments and sudden shifts in lighting—is perhaps the film’s biggest mistake, as it would be a mistake for any serious work; the movie bounces back and forth between shadowy, underlit interiors and glaringly overexposed, desaturated street scenes like a yo-yo. But perhaps most subtly destructive of all is the attitude of the director to his subject: serious, yes, but also faintly condescending, with its slight but insistent invitation to us to keep our distance, whether one of pitying amusement (perhaps inevitable in scenes of long garrulous drunken conversations) or outright pathos. It’s Huston’s world all right, but he seems to have become a tourist in it.

If there’s a film Fat City reminds me of, it’s not one of Huston’s own but The Last Picture Show, and not just because of the presence in both of Jeff Bridges and the Country-Western music on the soundtrack. (I think I can do without twanging guitars as deceptively sunny accompaniment to somber drama and know I can do without Kris Kristofferson’s groaning for the rest of my life.) Both films have a studied, self-conscious quality which finally robs them of any greater resonance; they remain little films not so much from modest intentions as out of a cramping calculation. What Fat City is finally like most is an art-house version of a Huston film, rather like one of those espresso versions of Hitchcock by Chabrol: an artful imitation by someone who’s mastered all—but only—the mechanics. There was more real sense of the charged ambience of early Huston in a basically silly film like The Kremlin Letter than in all of Fat City’s grim earnestness. (Only one scene—of a young black fighter working himself up with some bellicose language in the dressing room before going out in the ring and losing—captures the old drive.) In reviewing The Kremlin Letter¹ I mentioned Huston’s defensive comment, when The Kremlin Letter was sneak-previewed at a showing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that he thought his film suffered in comparison with the other (now, for Fat City, he’s acquired Butch Cassidy’s photographer). But recently, in an interview, Huston said that, though he knows he’s made some recent films which are inexcusable, one he likes, despite his feeling himself alone in this, is The Kremlin Letter. In a way, I find more grounds for hope about Huston in that remark than in Fat City.

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Between making The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah made another film, The Ballad of Cable Hague, which has understandably tended to get overlooked in the furor provoked by the two more explosive works. The Ballad of Cable Hogue was a likable film, but also a rather lame one, with a jejune attempt to milk a comic sequence for laughs by shooting it in fast motion, and a typically stagey performance by Jason Robards. Yet even if I didn’t care for the film, I respected the way it held fast to the twin themes of Peckinpah’s previous work: the closing of the frontier; the violence of American life, and ambivalence of our attitudes to that violence. In the end, the desert-rat protagonist of Cable Hague is run over and killed in his own shrinking desert by an early-model automobile.

With Straw Dogs, Peckinpah took the single theme of violence perhaps as far as he could go with it, and now, as if freed by that, has made a film, Junior Bonner, as sweet-tempered as the earlier film was savage. Its eponymous protagonist—J.R. he’s also called—is the son of a faded rodeo star, Ace Bonner, and a fading rodeo star himself, who drives his weather-beaten white Cadillac into his home town of Prescott, Arizona, for a few days and stays just long enough to take part in the annual rodeo which is staged there in the diminishing space among mobile homes. He sees his family (his parents, separated but still emotionally bound to each other, his brother, the local trailer-tycoon), has a brief affair with a girl he meets, and wins a rodeo event by staying on a ferocious Brahma bull longer than eight seconds. Nothing much happens, except that some people, the place they inhabit, and the quality of their lives are brought vividly before us. Which is to say that everything happens. At the end, as in a good novel, one feels one has known and lived with some people through a time in their lives the moments of which crystallize into a definition of who and what they are.

Junior is driven to win the rodeo event by pride and his need to test himself, but, though he’s broke, the prize money goes to stake his father in the latter’s scheme of gold-prospecting in Australia, a last frontier. Before the rodeo, during an affectionately observed parade, Junior and Ace ride off to sit together at a small deserted railway station, talking and reminiscing, and Ace tries then to borrow the money he needs to go to Australia. Junior tells him he hasn’t got the money, and, in a moment of angry disappointment, Ace knocks his son’s hat off onto the tracks; a moment later, as Ace goes to retrieve it, a through-train passes between them, and Junior averts his eyes and winces, fearful that his father may be nearer the end of his rope than he’d taken him to be. (Shortly after, Ace jokes with Junior, and, in a lovely fleeting moment, exchanges a word and look with him full of their shared acknowledgment of how little their schemes amount to.) Curly, the businessman-son, had paid for Ace’s last prospecting venture, buying (cheap) some land on which the family’s memory-filled old home had stood to clear it for development, but he has no further patience with his father’s schemes, and refuses to give him anything more now than an allowance. “I don’t want you to turn out like the old man,” Curly tells Junior, offering him a job. “You know less about those wide open spaces than I do. You’re just some kind of motel cowboy.” And later, “I’m workin’ on my first million, and you’re still workin’ on eight seconds.”

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Yet if the film’s sympathies lie chiefly with Ace and Junior (and with Junior’s mother, whom Ace has more or less abandoned to Curly’s well-meaning plan of setting her up in a model home and curio shop), Curly isn’t caricatured; nor is his wife, whom we see snap at the mother (“Mom, do you have to smoke while you’re feeding our baby?”) across an edgy family supper table. For they are all family—and loving, however estranged from each other by irreconcilable cross-purposes. And it is the sense of family even more than of rodeo which permeates the film, from its larger confrontations to such small, unerring details as the way Junior’s mother feeds him on his return home without a word about food passing between them, or the way he clasps her hand as they sit at the kitchen table. If there’s one central scene in the film, it’s not Junior’s win in the rodeo contest but an extraordinarily delicate scene of leave-taking, filled with sharp reproach and tender regret, between Ace and his wife. And though Junior isn’t in the scene, so much of the father is in the son that one feels it to be somehow a prevision of Junior’s life as well, if he will ever have even this much of a family to walk away from.

Junior wins the rodeo event, but his wins have been fewer and fewer, and one feels there aren’t many more in his future. Yet the film isn’t really about winning, or losing, least of all losing in that rather metaphysical sense which hangs so oppressively over Fat City, and turns even a boxer’s actual victory in the ring into another bleak defeat. (In the rodeo, Ace and Junior enter the comic wild-cow-milking event as a team, and, finishing first, lose only because Ace trips and falls with his bottle of milk on his way to the judges. “We could’ve won,” Ace says disgustedly. “We did,” Junior tells him.) Rather it’s about making do, the rarely victorious but sometimes heroic business of living. “If this world’s all for the winners, what’s for the losers?” Ace asks at one point, and Junior replies, “Well, somebody’s got to hold the horses.” I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer this left unsaid, yet, if the scenarist, Jeb Rosebrook, is responsible for those few things in the film I might have wished different (I believe I heard Junior twice speak of going down his own road, which would be twice too often for my tastes), he is surely responsible also for much in the film which is extremely fine. And though I’ve spoken in the past about Peckinpah’s ability to impress his visual style on the work of a variety of photographers, Lucien Ballard does make a difference; this is probably the best- looking American film—in its heightened drama of light and shade and color—since The Wild Bunch. But what is distinctively Peckinpah’s own (beyond the look and feel and texture of the film) is the way it’s been put together.

That one can probably see the film without even being conscious of its editing is to some extent a measure of Peckinpah’s achievement. For what Peckinpah has done is to create a profusely edited style in which, despite the shimmering mosaic effect, there is no sense of narrative fragmentation, and, as much as in the long-take cinema of Renoir, the sense of an integral world seen wholly and of a wealth of detail available to the eye without coercion; that coercion—visual and emotional—which for me somewhat mars the sequence of the flash cuts of the rape imposed on the scene of the church social in Straw Dogs, the passage in Peckinpah’s work where my admiration for his brilliance probably runs coldest. (Generally, though I find Straw Dogs tremendously exciting, I like it less than I do Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch.) Watch, on the other hand, the narrative fluency of the split-screen sequence beneath the credits in Junior Bonner, or the unobtrusive incorporation of such details as the business with Ace’s dog snapping at Junior’s heels when the dog’s tied up near Junior’s horse on the rodeo grounds. Even more so than did the more assertively edited Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner provokes me to wonder whether anyone making narrative films has ever edited film more beautifully than Peckinpah. Yet I wouldn’t want to isolate this accomplishment, or artificially draw distinctions about my unified sense of Junior Bonner as being at once beautifully made and beautifully felt: rowdy and sad, a film which lives, breathes, and richly fills a space. I’ve seen a good many American films I’ve enjoyed and admired during the past ten years, a surprising number of them recently, but perhaps no more than half a dozen I’d want to live with, to see again and again with the passage of time. Sam Peckinpah has made at least three of these. Junior Bonner is one of them.

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¹ COMMENTARY, November 1970.