Hailed as John Huston's “comeback” film in 1972, Fat City is a film that deserves to come back more often. Based on a novel by Leonard Gardner, who also wrote the screenplay, and photographed by the excellent Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood, see June 18), it is a portrait of the seedy, small-time boxing milieu of Stockton, CA. (“Huston is in his element here,” Andrew Sarris wrote, “simply because his realistic affectations have always been merely a cover and an alibi for his romantic affection for the compulsive losers of this world.”) The losers in Fat City are two prizefighters (Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges), a sherry-drinking barfly (Susan Tyrrell), her jailed and released black lover (Curtis Cokes), and assorted fight managers, boxers, lettuce pickers, bartenders and countermen... Never have such down-and-out movie figures so stunningly transcended the gloom of their world with the humor and intelligence of plain-spoken poetry: Gardner's dialogue was praised by Vincent Canby as “the kind of dialogue that movies usually can't afford, that defines time, place, mood and character while seemingly going nowhere.”