Stay Hungry (1976)

Stay Hungry is a 1976 dramatic comedy film by director Bob Rafelson from a screenplay by Charles Gaines (adapted from his 1972 novel of the same name).

The story centers on a young Birmingham, Alabama, scion, played by Jeff Bridges, who gets involved in a shady real-estate deal. In order to close the deal, he needs to buy a gym building to complete a multi-parcel lot. When he visits the gym, however, he finds himself romantically interested in the receptionist (Sally Field) and drawn to the carefree lifestyle of the Austrian body builder "Joe Santo" (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who is training there for the Mr. Universe competition.

Roger Callard, one of the top bodybuilders of that era, was quoted in a 1983 bodybuilding magazine regarding an event he experienced during the making of the film. “The director was screaming over his megaphone, ‘Please do not touch the bodybuilders!’ People were rushing us, even scratching us!”

Schwarzenegger won a Golden Globe for "Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture" for his portrayal of Joe Santo in Stay Hungry. Technically, it was not his debut role, since he had played Hercules (as "Arnold Strong") in the 1970 film Hercules in New York and a hitman in Robert Altman's 1973 film The Long Goodbye. It was, however, the first time his voice had been heard on film as Hercules was dubbed and the hitman character was deaf and mute.

Synopsis

Craig Blake (Jeff Bridges) is a young Southern man born of a wealthy family, but left lonely and idle after his parents died in a plane crash. He is content to spend his time fishing, hunting and puttering around his large family mansion, inhabited only by himself and a butler (Scatman Crothers). Blake's "job" is a sinecure working at a shady investment firm run by a slick con artist named Jabo (Joe Spinell) and he does very little actual work. But since he has to have his name "on paper" somehow as an employee, he is asked to personally transact the purchasing of a small gym that the real estate firm is buying in order to clear space for an office high-rise.

Actors