Fat City is a 1972 American sports drama film directed and produced by John Huston, and adapted by Leonard Gardner from his 1969 novel of the same title.

The plot follows a former champion boxer (Keach) who begins to develop a rivalry with a younger fighter (Bridges) on the rise, whom he is training.

The supporting cast features several real-life boxing personalities, including Art Aragon, Curtis Cokes and Al Silvani.

Billy Tully, a boxer past his prime, goes to a gym in Stockton, California, to get back into shape and spars with Ernie Munger, an 18-year-old he meets there.

For his first bout back, Tully is matched against a tough Mexican boxer named Lucero, who is of an advanced age and in considerable pain.

Art Aragon (Babe) was a former top lightweight contender, and Curtis Cokes (Earl) was the simultaneous WBA, WBC and The Ring World Welterweight Champion,[4] though ironically his character isn't a boxer.

After a string of box office flops, John Huston rebounded with this film, which opened to tremendous praise and good business, and he was soon in demand for more work.

Ernie and Tully, along with Oma (Susan Tyrrell), the sherry-drinking barfly Tully shacks up with for a while, the small-time fight managers, the other boxers and assorted countermen, upholsterers, and lettuce pickers whom the film encounters en route, are presented with such stunning and sometimes comic accuracy that Fat City transcends its own apparent gloom.

Ebert wrote, "[Huston] treats [the story] with a level, unsentimental honesty and makes it into one of his best films...[and] the movie's edges are filled with small, perfect character performances.

"[10] Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader wrote, "John Huston's 1972 restatement of his theme of perpetual loss is intelligently understated.

"[11] Film critic Dennis Schwartz wrote, "The downbeat sports drama is a marvelous understated character study of the marginalized leading desperate lives, where they have left themselves no palpable way out.

The site's consensus reads: "Fat City is a bleak, mordant, slice of life boxing drama that doesn't pull its punches".

[16] Wins Nominations Under the then-extant rules, Stacy Keach should have been awarded Best Actor from the New York Film Critics Circle for his portrayal of Tully because it required only a plurality of the vote.

A vocal faction of the NYFCC, dismayed by the rather low percentage of votes that would have given Keach the award, successfully demanded a rule change so that the winner would have to obtain a majority.

In subsequent balloting, Keach failed to win a majority of the vote, and he lost ground to the performance of Marlon Brando in The Godfather.