Terror In The Neighborhood (Ring Of Fear)

My thoughts on the return of Night of the Juggler

Whenever an older film containing elements that might be deemed questionable by contemporary standards gets a revival, anyone writing about it is pretty much required to make some comment along the lines of how things have change and how filmmakers today could not possibly get away with some of the excesses contained within. In the case of Night of the Juggler, which has languished in near-total obscurity since its initial 1980 release and which is now making a brief return to theaters before arriving on home video in September, here is a film so grim, nasty and scuzzy that not only would it never pass muster by today’s standards, it boggles the mind that it could have even existed back then. Made in New York City during its late-70s nadir, here is a film that presents the Big Apple as a crime-ridden, graffiti-strewn bombed-out nightmare so scuzzy and depraved that, in terms of cinematic depictions of the city, makes Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981) look like Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) by comparison. Some movies leave you with the urge to take a shower after watching them—this one leaves you feeling more in need of the kind of decontamination that Meryl Streep underwent in Silkwood and even that might not be enough to rid you of the sense of ickiness upon seeing it. What is especially astonishing is that this was not the product of one of the exploitation film outlets that were still in business back then—this was a major studio release with reasonably well-known names on both sides of the camera, even if not all of them made it through to the end of production.

Set over the course of one very long and sweltering hot day in the city in which practically everyone appears to be on a short fuse, we are introduced to Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman), an blue-collar guy with grudges against both the African-Americans and Hispanics who have moved into his South Bronx neighborhood and made it into a rubble-strewn mess and greedy real estate developers who swoop in to buy the now-devalued properties in order to build expensive new buildings and price out those who had been living there. Instead of venting his spleen with a nasty letter to the Post, Soltic hits upon a more direct plan of getting back at those who have wronged him—he plans to kidnap the 13-year-old daughter of one of those real estate moguls as she is walking through the park on her way to summer school, drag her to his crumbing home and ransom her for a million dollars.

Unfortunately, despite his rigorous planning (including calling the girl’s home that morning pretending to be from her school to confirm that she will be in attendance), Gus manages to screw things up by grabbing the wrong girl. To make matters worse for him, the girl that he does kidnap, Kathy (Abby Bluestone), is the daughter of Sean Boyd (James Brolin), a blue-collar type who wears flannel shirts even in the oppressive heat, drives a truck for a living and eats hot dogs for breakfast. Boyd, as it happens, is also a former cop who was booted from the force after informing on dirty colleagues and when he witnesses Kathy being taken, he immediately gives chase—with some help from a sassy Puerto Rican cabbie played by, uh, Mandy Patinkin—and almost rescues her before she is spirited away by Soltic.

The rest of the movie basically consists of Boyd’s relentless pursuit of his daughter and her kidnapper, a journey that finds him single-handedly busting up a Hispanic street gang, running wild in a 42nd St. peep show while looking for a stripper who may possess a clue that could lead him to his quarry and trying to avoid one of those aforementioned dirty cops (Dan Hedaya), whose vendetta against him at one point leads to him wildly firing off a shotgun at Boyd in the middle of a chase through a crowded park. While all this is going on, Abby tries to convince Soltic that he has taken the wrong person and that her dad is not a millionaire, Soltic, apparently not repellent enough as is, begins to demonstrate a pedophilic interest in his victim and another cop, Lt. Tonelli (Richard Castellano) doggedly tries to bring the case to a close while also trying to prepare for his daughter’s upcoming wedding.

Based on the novel of the same name by William P. McGivern, Night of the Juggler is a film that had a somewhat snakebit production history. It was originally set to be directed by Sidney J. Furie, whose credits included such notable titles as The Ipcress File (1965), The Appaloosa (1966) and Lady Sings the Blues (1972), but left the production after a couple of weeks of shooting in 1978 when filming shut down after Brolin broke his foot while performing a stunt. (He would also be replaced as director on what was supposed to be his next project, the infamous remake of The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond.) Furie was replaced with Robert Butler, another journeyman director whose credits ranged from such Disney live-action efforts as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), The Barefoot Executive (1971) and Hot Lead and Cold Feet (1979) to the amusing college comedy Up the Creek (1984). Once production was completed, it faced problems with the MPAA, who objected to a scene in which Soltic made explicit reference to his pedophilic nature, eventually redubbing the offending dialogue. Then, when the movie was finally ready to come out, the studio executive at Columbia Pictures who had overseen the production left to take a job at a rival studio and the head of Columbia lost interest in putting anything behind its promotion. This might also explain why the film has been all but impossible to see over the last few decades outside of bootleg DVDs and the occasional YouTube stream.

Seen today, it is pretty astonishing, in pretty much every sense of the word. As a narrative, it is pretty dopey. The screenplay by Bill Norton and Rick Natkin (whose names can be found on such films as Big Bad Mama (1974),Gator (1976) and The Boys in Company C, is so in-your-face and devoid of nuance that it makes the later Death Wish sequels seem subtle and restrained by comparison. What they have churned out is essentially a crazed and extremely shallow hybrid of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) in which a righteously angry white guy pounds his way through the streets of New York to find the degenerate who snatched his daughter before anything vile can happen to her and where practically every line of dialogue is delivered in what could politely be referred to as “outside voices.” The dialogue runs the gamut from bland boilerplate to pure nonsense (especially the line delivered by Soltic meant to explain the film’s oddball title), the plot developments are often ludicrous and there are times when no one seems to act like a credible human being simply to get another fight going.

Although Soltic (an undeniably strong performance from Gorman, who had won a Tony a few years earlier for starring in Lenny) is properly loathsome—the screenplay seems to be setting him up to be potentially sympathetic in regards to the stuff involving the loss of his home but then doubles down on his ugliness, presumably to avoid challenging the target audience—our nominal hero is not exactly a ray of sunshine either. Over the course of the film, he ends up beating most everyone he encounters, breaks countless laws and shows some discomfiting racist tendencies of his own. Even his look is a bit disconcerting—Brolin is sporting the same dark full beard and mustache that he had in The Amityville Horror (1979), which he made after this, and while it gave him an appropriately menacing look that worked in the context of that particular project, here it feels as if someone decided to cast Charles Manson in the lead. (Although Brolin is physically convincing in the role, he doesn’t make much of an impression in the end—you may find yourself thinking about other actors from that era who might have fit better in the role.)

And yet, while Night of the Juggler tends to veer wildly between being simplistic and being idiotic, there are times when it is undeniably effective. From the moment that Kathy is grabbed to the arrival of the end credits, the film hurtles along at an appropriately rapid pace that hardly ever takes a moment to pause. A number of the big action beats are nicely staged and genuinely thrilling. The extended car chase through the park and the city near the beginning has a truly visceral feel that will put you in the mind of the similarly epic chases done by WIlliam Friedkin in such classics as The French Connection (1971) and To Live and Die and L.A.(1985) while the final sequence, in which Boyd pursues Soltic through a series of underground tunnels is equally intense and staged with a great flair for atmosphere. While the film as a whole is almost unrelenting in its grimness, it does occasionally offer up some lighter moments of amusement—Boyd commandeering the station wagon belonging to a street preacher for part of the chase, Tonelli enjoying some frozen yogurt until he learns exactly how it is made, the way that Hedaya begins every scene at 11 and somehow manages to ramp it up from there. Perhaps most significantly, it serves as an inadvertent time capsule of the period before places like Times Square were cleaned up in ways that got rid of the grime and rot but also disposed of the area’s peculiar charms and grotesque beauty. (At one point, the action passes by a old movie theater advertising Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)—one of the very few films that could compete with this one in terms of sheer nastiness—on its marquee and I almost swooned with delight.)

Whether you should seek out Night of the Juggler or not pretty much depends on what exactly you are hoping to see. If you are looking for a taut, gritty thriller, it doesn’t quite work because the whole narrative is almost too implausible to bear at times. At the same time, it doesn’t really play as camp either because the film is so unapologetically bleak and nasty throughout that even when it heads towards its most lunatic extremes, the brutality is so much that any inadvertent laughs tend to get caught in the throat. On the other hand, if you are someone who has a taste for unabashedly lurid exploitation trash and are willing to wade through unwieldy plots and uninteresting characters to get to the good parts, it does work on some basic fundamental level and students of the history of New York will cherish the film’s return as a way to get an eye-opening look at a period that the city would rather forget. Put it this way—if you watch Taxi Driver and afterwards think to yourself, “Ahhh, memories. . .,” then Night of the Juggler is just for you.