During Seventies American cinema, the filmmakers (and their crews) were making nearly every frame of their work into what constitutes art. Opening credit sequences were longer before the Seventies. Some tell the opening frame of the story ("All The President's Men,") others spend more time with music ("Saturday Night Fever") and travel ("Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.") This was the age where the film promotion topped out with an ad in the newspaper. Star power was only beginning its next iteration.
In John Huston's 1972 gritty, human boxing tale "Fat City" and Sidney Lumet's 1975 classic "Dog Day Afternoon," both directors use the opening sequence to construct a world for you to enter. With a documentarian approach, the goal is to present daily life as both a thing of beauty and tragedy.
"Dog Day Afternoon" opens with Elton John's rustic album cut "Amoreena" and a series of shots that would not be far from an ad for summer in New York City. Kids leaping into rooftop swimming pools, sculpted lawns from the outer boroughs, people beating the heat under umbrellas. It is merely a hot Friday afternoon, road workers keep jackhammering, and traffic is already backed up before the five o'clock journey home. Editor Dede Allen who layered the Elton John song into the montage, juxtaposes the cuts. We see the slums, the homeless sleeping on the burning pavement, and trash seeming to envelop a city just a couple of years away from declaring bankruptcy. From the back of a station wagon, Lumet's camera crew led by Victor J. Kemper met his goal of capturing a "boring day" whose spell almost makes us miss that car pulling up outside of Brooklyn's sleepy Chase Manhattan bank about to close. This is no longer just a film, you are connected with this world.
While we are not certain, its inspiration for use may have been borrowed from "Fat City," a small feature starring a young Jeff Bridges and Stacy Keach. With no top-line star power, it was possibly far easier for the legendary John Huston to end his decades-long residence in Ireland and return to American film with a vengeance. With the same naturalist eye that enhances his 1979 film "Wise Blood," Huston immediately gives "Fat City" a dark but human tone. Cinematographer Conrad L. Hall and editor Walter A. Thompson cross-fade shots of Stockton, CA's rotting skid row (which actually was partially eliminated by 1969.) The Central Valley city's vast history is captured in the faces of a diverse set of shots of citizens mostly just living. We are allowed to see their vision of everyday life. Men still wear hats. Long hair is being cut off. Two men drink outside of an Asian market. The Mission which once helped so many, is for sale. Dilapidated buildings are the backdrop where residents idly wander by. There are no rules (the loiterers in front of the "No Loitering" sign) and no hope. This is the past barely hanging on to live through the present. Still, and perhaps most importantly, these are people living with the bare minimum from day to day but never showing their desperation to their fellow residents. If this short piece of film does anything, it creates a more resonant foundation than the multiple versions of Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through The Night" that pepper the film. As "Fat City" shifts from dive bars, ancient gyms, and dank hotel rooms, it finds unique beauty in the people who ground this hardscrabble tale in reality.
