In 1969 Leonard Gardner wrote one of America’s great novels. It was about small-time boxing in Stockton, California, in the 1950s, a book that is, the novelist Denis Johnson says, “so precisely written and giving such value to its words that I felt I could almost read it with my fingers.” Many writers still feel that way about the book. So we all worried when we heard there was a film coming. But they used Gardner’s script, and shot it in Stockton. It is one of John Huston’s quiet masterpieces, featuring utterly convincing performances by Stacy Keach, a very young Jeff Bridges, and Susan Tyrrell. Conrad Hall was the cameraman. One fight Keach participates in is so unreadable (unlike most fights in a boxing movie) that the tension is exhausting. So is a brief, disturbing performance by Sixto Rodriguez as an injured boxer. Fat City has a huge, authentic, utterly convincing and compassionate quietness.