Night of the Juggler
|  Night of the Juggler, which has been given a major restoration and theatrical re-release 45 years after it first hit theaters, is not a particularly good movie, but it is a deeply, morbidly fascinating one. First, it is one of those intriguing early 1980s releases that has much more in common with the grimy, despondent thrillers of the mid-1970s—think The French Connection (1971), Death Wish (1974), Fort Apache, the Bronx (1976)—than the slick, action-polished hits of the Reagan era (further proof that the major shifts in American film culture from the ’70s to the ’80s took years to take root, creating a strange, beguiling gray zone in-between). The film was actually shot in 1978, but various issues delayed its release until the spring and summer of 1980. The production itself was a nightmare, with actor James Brolin breaking his foot, which halted principal photography for several months, and original director Sidney J. Furie being replaced by Robert Butler halfway through production. Second, it is one of the most outlandish mixes of gritty realism and over-the-top absurdism I have ever seen packed between credit sequences. An immense amount of effort was clearly made to shoot on location, to make the mean streets of New York City and its then-blighted environs into a character of their own, and when sets were constructed, they were done with such care and attention to detail that you would think you were in the real deal. Yet, within those settings we get utterly ridiculous sequences like the one in which an angry police detective pursues another man through crowded city streets in broad daylight surrounded by hundreds of people, repeatedly blasting at him with a shotgun—not even a pistol, but a wide-scattering shotgun. It’s the king of preposterous movie behavior that lets all the air out of the pretense of realism. Set primarily against the worst locales the Big Apple had to offer when it was at its most rotten, Night of the Juggler centers on a politically driven kidnapping gone awry. A raving, racist psychopath named Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman) is nursing a torrent of socio-economic grudges, particularly his fervent belief that developers have been purposefully flooding his Bronx neighborhood with criminals of color so they can justify demolishing the tenement buildings and erecting new condos. Soltic lives in one of the only remaining shells of a building in a particularly blasted block of the South Bronx, and he is determined to stick it to his would-be persecutors. So, he kidnaps what he thinks is the daughter of a developer so he can extort him for a million dollars and buy back his building. Unfortunately, he snatches the similar-looking Kathy Boyd (Abby Bluestone), who is not only not the daughter of a wealthy developer, but rather the daughter of Sean Boyd (James Brolin), a former New York police detective who was run out of his job for doing the right thing too many times. Boyd, being the determined, hard-headed (and shaggy-headed) do-gooder that he is, spends the rest of the movie raising hell while trying to figure out who took his daughter and get her back. This takes him to all manner of seedy locales throughout the city and earns him all kinds of enemies, including Sgt. Otis Barnes (Dan Hedaya), who is still nursing a grudge against Sean for having ratted out his corruption the year before (he is the aforementioned shotgun-wielding detective); an entire gang of criminal youths on whose turf he dares to tread; and a small army of bouncers in a skeevy, all-nude peep show. He does pick up a partner of sorts in Maria (Julia Carmen), a young woman who helps him track down some crucial information and decides to help him in his plight. Meanwhile, Lt. Tonelli (Richard S. Castellano), the detective in charge of the kidnapping, is just trying to figure out what is going on.Night of the Juggler was scripted by Bill Norton Sr., already a veteran of entertaining-crass fare like Big Bad Mama (1974), Gator (1976), and Day of the Animals (1978), and Rick Natkin, who previously scripted the Vietnam drama The Boys in Company C (1978) with original director Sidney J. Furie from a 1975 novel by William P. McGivern, who was best known for writing the novel on which Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) was based. It is hard to know which sequences were directed by Furie and which by Butler, as the film is at least consistent in its jangly exploitation of urban wastelands and cartoonish criminality (the gangs don’t quite match the comic-book luridness of those in The Warriors the year before, but they come close). At times it feels like Night of the Juggler is trying to saying something meaningful about power, poverty, and how those with the former tread all over the latter, and it certainly stands as a visual testament to extent of urban blight during that period. But, there is just too much absurdity to take it seriously in any meaningful way.Copyright © 2025 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Kino Lorber |
Overall Rating: 
(2.5)
