Robert Butler’s 1980 New York-set Night of the Juggler
amply makes up in pace and aggressive local colour for what it lacks in other
areas (plausibility, for one). Cliff Gorman plays Gus Soltic, driven by
obsessive hatred of the real estate developers he blames (often in violently
racist terms) for ruining his life; he plans to kidnap the daughter of one such
tycoon, but gets the wrong girl, setting her ex-cop father Sean Boyd (James
Brolin) on his trail, and the local cops chasing after both of them (including a
crazed former colleague of Boyd’s bearing a murderous grudge, played with absurd
relish by a heavily indulged, bulging-eyed Dan Hedaya). The film packs a
tremendous volume of confrontation and incident into its hundred or so minutes,
with some top-quality extended chase scenes (one of them featuring an
uproarious, if again dubiously conceived appearance by an edge-of-stardom Mandy
Patinkin). The film conveys a recurring faint sense of loss and longing: in Soltic’s
constant references to his dead mother (he makes the kidnapped girl wear one of
her old dresses); in the objectively inexplicable decision of a woman who helps
Boyd along the way to drop everything and tag along with him, perhaps forever;
even in the plaintive look of a nude Times Square dancer who passes along a key
clue. But that’s all intertwined with a sense of teeming, often almost gleeful
possibility, albeit of a kind that might at any moment become deadly, the city
as depicted here being riven with factionalism and race-based suspicion. In the
end, despite all the trauma, the girl asserts that she still doesn’t want to
move to boring Connecticut with her mother: a glib wrap-up given all she’s
endured, but in line with how, in classic action movie manner, the newly
constituted family is allowed to walk away into something close to a sunset.
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