Illustration by Jeff Cashvan
Movie-lovers!
We are thrilled to debut a collaboration between MUBI’s Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, our monthly event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. For each screening, my co-hosts and I pick a flick that we think embodies the era of all-night moviegoing down the “Glittering Gulch,” and present the theater at which it premiered. We think our little variety act is delicious fun... call us bawdy bon vivants.
Back in 2015, we had the wonderful chance to thread and project the only known 35mm print in existence of Robert Butler’s Night of the Juggler (1980)—a memorable evening and a memorable film. Hence, we decided that this is the perfect title to get the ball rolling…
Also at our monthly shindig: our 'famous' raffle, the grand prize of which is always an original poster illustrated by 'Maestro Jeff' Cashvan. Jeff continues this tradition with his one-sheet above... Enter for your chance to win this fine artifact by shooting us an email and saying hi: thedeucefilmseries@gmail.com
So, forthwith, some thoughts about Night of the Juggler and the city we love.
-The Deuce Jockeys
An original lobby card for ‘Night of the Juggler’ featuring Cliff Gorman and Abby Bluestone. The marquees for the Apollo (l) and Times Square (r) Theatres can be seen behind them.
“I’ll take some coffee, a danish, and three aspirin... and I got a feeling, it’s gonna be another goddamn New York day,” spits Richard Casetellano’s Lt. Tonelli during Night of the Juggler’s opening credits sequence. Meanwhile, James Brolin’s ex-cop turned trucker Sean Boyd (the image of Marlboro Man chic) returns his rig to the meatpacking district and heads to wish his daughter a happy birthday. Had she gotten her birthday wish—to skip summer school and go somewhere special with dad—none of the ensuing mess would have happened. Villain and “mole man” Gus Soltic, expertly played by Queens native Cliff Gorman (who appeared in other seminal New York classics: Boys in the Band, Cops and Robbers, An Unmarried Woman, and All That Jazz), burrows into the bowels of Central Park’s Delacorte Theater and springs his trap, commencing a relentless, white-knuckled 24-hour cat and mouse chase through Manhattan and the Bronx… What a New York day it turns out to be!!
Thus, Juggler hurtles into high gear with a mind-bendingly brilliant, 14-minute kidnapping sequence on a sublime summer morning. For some ransom cash, Gorman grabs his “million dollar baby“—accidentally, Brolin’s daughter Kathy (Abby Bluestone)—and, in red-hot pursuit, Dad hops into the checker of a Puerto Rican-accented and scene-stealing Mandy Patinkin, here playing “Allesandro the Cabbie.” (Incidentally, at the time of Juggler’s release, Patinkin was starring in Evita at the Broadway Theater, just up the Great White Way 11 blocks north of the Deuce.) Brolin jumps a turnstile at the 86th Street station and sucker punches a meddling subway cop; hurdles a bag lady running down 42nd; and carjacks an asthmatic preacher, crashing into a carrier trailer, leaving him bloodied, flabbergasted, and panting, “Sweet savior... Jesus doth save…” We’ve now been formally introduced to the main character of Night of the Juggler: New York in its post-70s bankruptcy demise… And the city has never looked so depraved—especially in glaring daylight. As another cabbie snarls to Gorman when he peels off the 72nd Transverse: “What the hell you think, this is Disneyland?!?”
The ad for ‘Night of the Juggler’ in the New York Times on Friday, June 6, 1980.
After premiering in a limited release on January 25, 1980, then touring the country for the next five months, Night of the Juggler eventually made its way to the Tri-State area on June 6, 1980, opening at a “Columbia Premiere Theatre” (in Manhattan, that meant the Embassy on Broadway at 47th or the Loews on Broadway at 83rd)—and on the south side of 42nd Street at the Harris Theatre, the third picture house west of 7th Avenue. Along the block that weekend flickered Friday the 13th and Somebody Killed Her Husband across the street at the Lyric; to the east, the New Amsterdam screened a double bill of Don’t Go in the House and Edge of Fury; just to the west, the Liberty ran Humanoids from the Deep and Piranha. Whatta weekend!
This was prime-era Deuce: all 11 old movie palaces were grinding double bills, barely advertised (to appease the studios, so they could gross more as single features on the legit screens) and hardly listed (You wanna know what’s playing? Check the marquees!). Throngs of teens from Harlem and Brooklyn played Skee-Ball at Fascination on Broadway before hitting the Godsend/The Hearse duo at the Selwyn; meanwhile, the Roxy Twin was showing blaxploitation and kung fu hits, and the Harem (westernmost screen on the north side) ran porn nearly 24/7. Flickering neon dazzled tourists, three-card-monty hustlers, and wide-eyed runaways fresh off the bus from Minnesota.
The Harris Theatre in 1986. Photo: John Mozzer
The Harris ran movies until July of 1994; it was the last man standing on a street of ghostly lobbies and barren marquees before passing the baton to the short-lived MoviePlex 42, a six screener that, after a $2.2 million reno, slid into the Roxy Burlesk’s caverns. The MoviePlex 42 operated for only two years before the near entire south side of the block was razed and the Loews E-Walk opened across the street in 1999.
For your fix of Harris history, check out ‘Tour Guide’ Andy’s stump stagger below:
Juggler’s B-picture at the Harris that week was Tom Horn, a Warner Bros. western directed by William Wiard and starring Steve McQueen, which opened at a “Flagship Theatre Near You” a few weeks earlier on May 23. Although most likely the result of the Harris’ buyer having booking rights to both films, it is an inspired bit of curation: Juggler is essentially a western—replace Jim Burk with Brolin’s shotgun-blasting nemesis Dan Hedaya; substitute the plains of Wyoming for the frontier of Bryant Park.
‘Night of the Juggler’ by William McGivern was published by Putnam in 1975.
The pulp novel Night of the Juggler was written by William McGivern, whose novels include The Big Heat and Odds Against Tomorrow and who wrote the screenplay to William Castle’s great I Saw What You Did. McGivern was brother-in-law to the film’s producer Jay Weston who, in a Chicago Tribune press blurb from December 1977, states that he intended to cast Gregory Peck in the Casetellano role and Michael Douglas in Brolin’s role, and to set the film in his hometown of Chicago. Thankfully, he didn’t. Instead, Weston hired screenwriter William W. Norton (who penned White Lightning, Big Bad Mama, and Day of the Animals) to stage the drama in the complex socio-economic-polictico landscape of late-70s Big Apple. Triumphant as the quintessential NYC thriller, Juggler “magnifies the hassles and dangers of living in the great metropolis,” as critic Dale Schneck put it. It’s impossible to imagine it set in Chicago—or anywhere else for that matter.
Financed by General Cinemas Corporation (the only other film produced by GCC, the Gary Busey/Annette O’Toole rom-com Foolin Around’, was also released in 1980), Juggler’s original director Sidney Furie left the production in a highly-publicized but mysteriously-motivated huff, and Robert Butler took the helm. An established television director (with many B-pictures under his belt to boot), whose credits include Hill Street Blues, Batman, Star Trek, and The Fugitive, Butler was the solid, reputable choice to deliver a taut, riveting action-adventure.
Brolin referred to Juggler as a “hardware movie,” typified by “the scene in Taxi Driver in which Travis Bickle meets a teenage gun salesman, who displays his wares in a seedy hotel room … Who do you think reads that magazine Soldiers of Fortune? In LA, it’s probably writers looking for ideas, but all over the rest of the US it’s sold to guys who in the back of their minds harbor Walter Mitty fantasies.” Gorman’s Walter Mitty fantasy is acutely detailed to his bewildered captive with cynical aplomb at the start of Act 2: his Bronx neighborhood’s been ruined by those Wall Street Brooks Brothers-custom suits who are hiring thugs to burn down its buildings. They’re cashing in on the land to develop strip malls and office towers, and he’s gonna make them PAY (“I’m gonna juggle the books my way, and it’s gonna balance out for me”). Sweeping vistas of the burnt-out Bronx fill the screen; Gorman and Bluestone precariously tip-toe over heartbreaking piles of rubble and debris. “This all used to be nice up here, I mean it was beautiful…”
The South Bronx in 1970. Photo: Camilo Jose Vergara
The scene is, of course, alluding to the recent purge of the South Bronx that plagued its poverty-stricken tenants. White flight, plummeting property values, and deserting slumlords resulted in one of the worst instances of urban decay in modern history, with the displacement of 300,000 residents and blazing destruction of entire neighborhoods. According to The New York Post, in its excellent exposé from May 16, 2010, "seven different census tracts in The Bronx lost more than 97% of their buildings to fire and abandonment between 1970 and 1980; 44 tracts (out of 289 in the borough) lost more than 50%." The Post continues, citing that as the city’s budget deficit ballooned, massive cuts to the fire department and its programs "helped turn the problem into a scourge, consuming block after block of once densely populated, viable neighborhoods ... the South Bronx was indeed burning… But many of these fires were not — as was suggested then and is popular opinion now — caused by a rash of arsons… Hoodlums did not burn The Bronx. The bureaucrats did.”
The great irony of Juggler’s mistaken-identity kidnapping (Gorman means to abduct the daughter of real estate mogul Marco St. Johns’ eye rollingly-named “Hampton Richmond Clayton III”) is that the girl who actually gets pinched belongs to Brolin’s blue-collar everyman, a unionized teamster née honest police officer. Oh, the injustice. While Brolin’s out on the streets getting his ass kicked, the intended victims are safely isolated in their Belfair Arms ivory tower overlooking Central Park West. Despite his family’s well-being, when St. Johns is not immediately assuaged by a condescendingly blasé Casetellano, he proudly declares, “I pay more taxes to this city in one month than you and your whole damn precinct earns in a year... I think I’m ENTITLED to some consideration.” As Star Tribune critic Bob Lundegaard described, the film is “populated almost totally by grotesques, freaks, and angry minorities,” but the truly execrable in Juggler are the “haves”—not the “have-nots”—bloated with hubris and jockeying for political supremacy and economic domination. For another slice of comeuppance dished out to real estate tycoon-tyrants, one that’s also set in the South Bronx, see Michael Wadleigh’s Wolfen, released in ’81.
A UDC map from 1984 detailing the 42 Development Project area and the 13 acres it would affect.
Back downtown, at the time of Juggler’s release, Times Square was on the brink of one of the most complex and controversial urban renewal endeavors ever launched, a project that would torment and disrupt the nabe’s denizens and mom-and-pop shop owners for the next 30 years. New York’s financial crisis and lawlessness of the ‘70s transformed “The Entertainment Center”’ into the “Vice Capital of the World,” densely concentrated with sex shops, peep shows, and massage parlors, and the organized criminals, drug pushers, and junkies such a district attracts. To many, Times Square was a tumor to be dislodged. In 1981, Governor Mario Cuomo and Mayor Ed Koch announced their “42nd Street Development Project”: a complicated—and ultimately failed—ten-year-plus campaign to revitalize the 13 acre-area through condemnation and eminent domain, the power of the state to seize (at bargain-basement prices) private property for public use, when “acting in the public’s best interest.” The New York Consolidated Laws description, however, on what constitutes appropriate “public interest” is extremely broad, almost undefined. This gave the New York State Urban Development Corporation, the organization that was granted exclusive condemnation authority in 1984, massive latitude in deciding what was “blight” or “physical, economic, and social decay,” and what determines a “criminal public” versus an “idealized general public.” In Designs on the Public: The Private Lives of New York’s Public Spaces (2007), author Kristine Miller writes, “In effect, the UDC was proposing a kind of city surgery, in which the bad part needed to be cut out to save the good … The removal of blight and the buildings and people that are part of it would allow a new, healthy, and moral public to take its place … This new public needed to be wealthy enough to spend $100.00 on a Broadway show or $40.00 on a new sweatshirt, rather than $5.00 on a second-run movie or $10.00 on a T-shirt.”
Mayor Ed Koch (l) and Governor Mario Cuomo (r) gloating over a model of the proposed 42DP, 1984. Photo: Neal Boenzi/NY Times.
The 42nd Street Development Project was really only successful in one thing: manipulating eminent domain law to take the property of private parties and give it to other private properties for the latter's use. Regardless of the 40+ separate lawsuits property owners mounted against the project, by 1990 the UDC had taken title to nine of the 13 acres, having spent nearly $300 million—a sum advanced by the developers, who—surprise!—would be reimbursed through massive, unprecedented tax abatements. Although the 42DP was by this time in the onset of dissolution, the damage to small business and property owners was done. William Stern, the former chief executive of the UDC, made a remarkable reversal in Perspectives on Eminent Domain Abuse (2015), a report published by the Institute for Justice, admitting, “I began to see the negative implications of government-directed projects like this — the influence peddling, cronyism, and corruption…” Stern adds, “this condemnation binge kicked out businesses of all types and sizes. To implement the project, the plan called for the demolition of 20 buildings and the displacement of 400 existing businesses, only a little more than 40 of which were adult bookstores or peep shows. In other words, although the sex businesses represented an economic drag on the area, our goal was to remove not only these establishments but all businesses that did not fit into the government’s master plan.” Mario Cuomo announced the 42DP’s collapse in August 1992, cowardly blaming a tumultuous stock market and letting the developers off the hook: “To hold these people to the contract is to ask them to commit an act of economic self-mutilation.”
Soon after, a refocus on “public safety” by the NYPD, and across the board tax cuts, inspired new developers like Viacom, Morgan Stanley, and Disney to move in. This purification of Times Square affected no other industry as much as its Red Light District: by the end of the century, Mayor Rudy Giuliani had shut down nearly one-half of the city’s 144 blue establishments with a zoning law that disallowed adult venues to operate within 500 feet of a church, school, or residential building. In July 2002, Peep-o-Rama was the last porn shop on West 42nd Street forced to close, not by the city, but by its new landlord Douglas Durst. That location’s modern-day tenant: the Bank of America Tower.
The 42nd Street Peepland, in a building shared with Tad’s Steakhouse, just to the west of the Harris Theatre, 1985. The Liberty marquee can be seen next door. Photo: Matt Weber
The centerpiece of Night of Juggler takes place at the 42nd Street Peepland, Lucky Pierre’d between the Harris and the Liberty Theatres. Impeccably cast adult superstar Sharon Mitchell (who started her career at 8th Avenue’s Show World, and who made other 1980 cameos in Bill Lustig’s Maniac and Allan Moyle’s Times Square) plays a generosity-endowed stripper who tips off Brolin, thrusting him towards the Bronx to ensnare his prey. Look out for “Peep Show Owner” played by downtown dive diva/uptown intrigue Tally Brown (the subject of her own documentary by portraitist provocateur Rosa von Praunheim), porno legend Serena as “Peep Show Barker,” hyperextended terpsichorean Tony Azito as “Peep Show Cashier,” and Warhol discovery Geraldine Smith as “Hooker.” This stand-out scene and its casting of real-life sex workers and underground oddities is poignant and elegiac, a moment of celluloid immortalization that honors a few of the eccentrics who were exterminated by the Times Square fumigation.
Throughout Night of the Juggler are constant references to the rupturing of New York, a “city that went broke,” where “all the cops were laid off,” and that’s “gonna close down the whole hospital.” No character in Juggler can escape their cage, no one is liberated from desperation. And from that despair, a kind of myth is born: Connecticut—at once mocked by Gotham diehards and extolled by the fortunate few who can afford summer homes—as an oasis for the elite, a haven of the privileged. In Juggler, economic disparity is exemplified by the opportunity to retreat and take refuge. Furthermore, the choice to leave becomes an ethical one. In the sole scene with Brolin’s ex-wife and mother of their child, Linda Miller screeches that “you couldn’t move, you love New York, you love the old neighborhood … a cesspool where people are raped on the streets … a slum with the rest of the degenerates, you kept her there and now she pays for it.” Brolin, in his daughter’s defense, responds, “She doesn’t want to live in a god damn house in Connecticut, she wants to stay here!!” It’s a gut-wrenching bit of backstory: New York City tore this family apart.
Don Nelson’s review of ‘Night of the Juggler’, published in The Daily News on June 7, 1980.
Night of the Juggler’s reception, while occasionally negative (Janet Maslin sneered that it “winds up as breathless and overplotted as a thriller can be”), was mostly glowing. Los Angeles Times Arts Editor Charles Champlin described Juggler’s finale as “quiet and sad. There is a fleeting impression that these are quite reasonably accurate facsimiles of real people, not symbols of pure good or pure evil, all facade.” Likewise, Don Nelson’s Daily News notice praised Gorman’s performance: he “paints his character in many hues, at once fearsome and sympathetic, victimizer yet victim, against a background of social woes … One does not often get this kind of depth in this kind of film.”
What makes Night of the Juggler both so prescient and so timeless is how directly and passionately it confronts and portrays the rage of communities as they defenselessly witness their homes disintegrating. The South Bronx and Times Square areas have been transformed and are now unrecognizable from the images we see on screen, for better or for worse. And history continues to repeat itself: Willets Point is still in the throes of Bloomberg’s plan to restore the “Iron Triangle” and capitalize on Citi Field’s surrounding neighborhoods.
Ultimately, an evanescent sense of ownership is the constant strife of us New Yorkers - we’re all vying for some sort of stability, a little anything we can harbor that won’t get snatched and reclaimed. Tad’s Steakhouse booths become Madame Tussauds' ticket counters, Sally’s Hideaway transitions into The Westin Hotel, and entire subcultures are extinguished when the urban underbelly is sanitized by such suburban saccharin. As NY Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable stated in her scathing, October 1989 criticism of the 42DP, “It is the most fragile kind of urban fabric, in a constant state of change. This vital and vibrant place has many lifelines. The sordid and the spectacular are never far apart … its commerce and culture are in uneasy equilibrium, while pressures build on the older communities around it.”
The Harris Theatre in April 1994. The movie palace closed three months later, in July.
And if it ain’t the plutocrats, it’s the pestilence. The desolation that the Covid-19 pandemic hath wrought on this town in the last 12 months rivals the decade of financial depression that marred the city 40 years ago. Upon this article’s publishing, 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues is a bleak shell of its 2019 self: 70% of the storefronts are momentarily defunct or permanently closed (even the gaudy, Vegas-esque McDonald’s marquee attached to the Candler Building—yes, the structure that stands adjacent to the former Harris Theatre foyer—has gone dark), the Regal E-Walk is indefinitely shuttered, the AMC Empire 25 is running at 25% capacity. The block these days is more reminiscent of its mid-90s incarnation—uninhabited and soon to be demolished—than ever before. Tourists are sparse, bridge-and-tunnel teens gotta head home early before the subway’s nightly cleaning, and Manhattan’s richest aren’t flocking to Broadway’s mega-watt productions, having fled to Connecticut and beyond, rendering countless 7th Avenue delis and all-night bodegas closed for good. But Fun City isn’t dead: little girls who prefer Hell’s Kitchen to Fairfield County will dig in their heels. Like the hot dog vendor says to Brolin at the seven-minute mark in Night of the Juggler: “10,000 people left New York last month... They can’t kill New York and they can’t kill the hot dog,” to which Brolin responds: “Well let ‘em leave. It’s more hot dogs for us.”
- text by Joseph A. Berger
Gazing at the north side of the Deuce, 1991. Photo: Mitch O’Connell
The Deuce Film Series is a monthly, 35mm presentation created by ‘Joe Zieg' Berger and co-hosted with 'Tour Guide Andy’ McCarthy and 'Maestro Jeff’ Cashvan. Produced by Max Cavanaugh for Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg, The Deuce was founded in November 2012.