A Disturbing 1980s NYC Crime Thriller Has Been AWOL — Until Now

“Somewhere in this city, possibly among these people, is a man… so close to the edge that when he breaks, it could change your life forever.”

The city is New York at the end of era, poised between being the place that a sitting President implied should “drop dead” and a metropolis on the verge of becoming a coked-up playground for Wall Street’s nouveau riche. The people are the everyday men and women that populate it, from working stiffs to fatcat bureaucrats. The man on the edge is named Gus Soltic, though his neighbors in the boogie-down Bronx call him “the Mole Man”; he works in the sewers under Central Park. Spoiler: He will break. And while he won’t necessarily change your life, Soltic is about to drag an ex-cop and his teenage kid through hell.

The movie is Night of the Juggler, and if you were lucky enough to catch this thriller when it first hit theaters in 1980 or played on premium cable channels for a few scant years afterward, then you probably remember it. Or at the very least, you can recall Cliff Gorman’s uniquely unsettling take on the urban psychopath; James Brolin at the peak of his bearded, Brawny-mascot hotness; and the way that the movie portrayed NYC in all its funky, late Seventies state of decay. Like many works from that fertile age of grindhouse-friendly filmmaking, this adaptation of William P. McGivern’s novel (originally titled Red Alert Central Park, a far better pulp-fiction handle) fell through the cracks in terms of distribution rights and home-entertainment-format updates. Apart from rare revival screenings, it’s been near impossible to see it outside of bootlegs for almost 40 years. That Kino Lorber has finally managed to give this cult classic a 4K restoration without sacrificing its sense of Forty-Deuce grit — and another theatrical run before a Blu-Ray release this fall — is a miracle. You could not ask for better throwback viewing than this on a hot August night.

Once upon a time, Brolin’s Sean Boyd wore a badge and kept Manhattan’s mean streets safe. Then he pulled a Frank Serpico and exposed the corruption of his fellow police officers, and suddenly, he’s part of the wave of NYPD layoffs. Now he drives a truck and dotes on his daughter Kathy (Abby Bluestone), who’s turning 15 today. Dad got them both tickets to the ballet that night, but she’s still got to go to summer school. Despite the fact that Boyd is bushed after a graveyard shift, he’s willing to walk her to school.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away, Soltic is finishing up his breakfast. After the single most menacing splattering of ketchup in the history of American cinema, he changes out of his uniform and stakes out on apartment on the upper west side. His target is the daughter of a real-estate developer who screwed his family over many years ago. Now the Mole Man wants to make them suffer. The plan is to kidnap the rich guy’s kid and demand a hefty ransom, though you feel like he’s the kind of sicko who’s not willing to stop there in terms of criminal behavior. Due to the fact that Kathy is wearing nearly the same outfit as the developer’s teen daughter, Soltic accidentally grabs her instead and throws her into the station wagon he’s just boosted. Sean quickly sprints after them.

What follows is one of the great unsung chase scenes of late-period New Hollywood, a 10-minute sequence in which our hero pursues the bad guy through upper Manhattan, aided by a Puerto Rican cabbie played by Mandy Patinkin — yes, that Mandy Patinkin. The cat-and-mouse game briefly transitions to the subway at the 86th Street stop before they both surface above ground again. Many cars are crashed. This sequence alone makes the film worth seeking out while it’s on big screens. (It kicked off its theatrical run this weekend in NYC at the IFC Center, and per Kino, will expand to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, and Toronto, among other cities, starting in September.) Brolin then spends the remainder of the movie using every one of his old connections and the help of various average New Yorkers to track down his missing teen. Despite the fact that the actor broke is foot early in the shoot (which led to original director Sidney J. Furie leaving the project and Robert Butler taking the reins), Brolin is in a state of constant motion. There is so much running in this film that they could have easily called it Day of the Jogger.

Despite the fact that Night of the Juggler hit theaters in June of 1980, it’s very much a movie of the 1970s, and is part of a wave of films that painted New York as a sort of Armageddon-in-progress that Pauline Kael dubbed “Horror City.” Everything appears to be breaking down and/or covered in a patina of sleaze. The outer boroughs look like war zones, ethnic gangs run rampant, midtown is littered with massage parlors and peep shows, and the police have their hands full with militants and double-digit murder rates. The movie’s climax takes place in the sewers, which somehow seem cleaner than the city perched on top of them. “Y’know, I got a feeling it’s gonna be another goddamned New York day,” one exasperated police lieutenant says early on, and the film spends the rest of its running time doubling down on his assertions. Welcome to the NYC that spurred conservative Middle America’s nightmares.

That aforementioned line, by the way, is spoken by Richard Castellano, better known as Clemenza from The Godfather — and he’s just one of the ensemble of extraordinary character actors from the era that help make this richly rancid time capsule rock hard. Dan Hedaya plays a cop still pissed at Boyd for the whole informing thing, and thinks nothing of opening fire on his former peer with a shotgun in the middle of a crowded Bryant Park. Sully Boyar, a.k.a. the bank manager from Dog Day Afternoon, shows up as administrator at a canine pound. (He’s graduated to afternoons spent with actual dogs!) You might recognize a street preacher as the same guy who played a doctor in The Exorcist; that’s Barton Heyman. And while the casting of Patinkin as that heavily accented cabbie is definitely… let’s call it “a choice,” the movie also hands a plum role to the great Puerto Rican actor Julie Carmen, who’s graced everything from John Cassavetes’ Gloria to The Milagro Beanfield War to Tales of the Walking Dead.

But Night of the Juggler is really Brolin and Gorman’s show. And while the movie certainly makes the case for the former tying with Burt Reynolds for Most Virile Screen Presence of the era, it’s the latter who turns this class-conscious kidnapping potboiler into one of the more disturbing thrillers of that transitional sociopolitical moment. An actor who graced The Boys in the Band and All That Jazz, and who won a Tony for playing Lenny Bruce in the original Broadway production of Lenny, Gorman is both the secret sauce and source of the movie’s diseased mojo. His Soltic initially courts sympathy with his tale of being economically screwed over by the city’s elite; this character’s racist views and growing, extremely unhealthy attraction to Boyd’s kid, however, quickly ixnays any notion of being on his side. There’s no question that this man is a psychopath, and Gorman leans into the ugliness. Yet he also gives him a sense of someone who’s been tainted, warped, left behind by the land of milk and honey. Back then, this version of God’s Lonely Man was easily recognizable as an outlier. Now Soltic would be recognizable as someone spewing hate and violence among communities of like-minded folks. It’s a metastisized have-not archetype with a grudge that has not gone away. Only the horror-city landscape has changed.