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FAT CITY

Directed by JOHN HUSTON Screenplay by LEONARD GARDNER

"Everybody dies," says a hustler in Body and Soul, one of the most memorable of all films about boxing. In Fat City, one of the least memorable, we watch a stifling process of human degradation symbolized by the desperate, random violence of tank-town prizefighting. Fat City is about a bunch of losers dying in spirit by slow, murderous inches. It lacks any substantial portion of compassion, however, any shred of insight to lift it above the level of a slumming expedition.

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.

Leonard Gardner's script (adapted from his novel) is a loosely strung series of miniature moral defeats that might be called character vignettes if there were any humanity in them. Tully (Stacy Keach) is a drunk, forever down on his luck and looking for a job, who hasn't had a fight in a year and a half. His dismal life with a rummy mis tress (Susan Tyrell) and his struggles to get back into boxing are intercut with the exploits of a younger but no more hopeful fighter (Jeff Bridges), who mar ries because he has to and promises to end up pretty much like Tully himself.

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, and Actress Tyrell's grandstand histrionics turn a surefire part into a Raggedy Ann caricature.