One of the last of the truly gritty New York City '70s crime films, Night of the Juggler was one of those films that only did so-so business at the box office but seemed to be everywhere on cable TV and VHS for years. Shot in 1978 but kept on the shelf by Columbia for quite a while, the film was released in the middle of 1980 following multiple high-profile industry trade reports about its turbulent production with initial director Sidney J. Furie replaced by Robert Butler (helmer of several '70s Disney films and 1997's wild Turbulence) who gets sole credit for the final result. (Weirdly, the same thing happened to Furie again right after this with The Jazz Singer.) Loaded with astonishing coverage of the entire city (including actor Dan Hedaya firing a shotgun out in public), the film made a strong impression on viewers at the time but, thanks to some major rights complications, dropped out of sight entirely starting in the 1990s and remained unavailable for decades until it was finally cleared up and restored in 2025.

Divorced ex-cop Sean Boyd (Brolin) has his life turned upside down one morning when some quality outdoor time with his daughter, Kathy (Bluestone), turns into a nightmare as she's kidnapped by the crazed, racist Gus Soltic (Gorman). Mistaking her High and Low-style for the daughter of a rich real estate tycoon he blames for the degradation of his South Bronx environment, Gus demands a ransom while Sean, who has already embarked on a dogged but fruitless car chase with Mandy Patinkin as the world's unlikeliest Puerto Rican cabbie, tears his way through the city looking for his abducted child. Along the way he teams up with dog pound employee Maria (Carmen) and crosses paths with vindictive dirty cop Sergeant Barnes (Hedaya), all with time rapidly running out.

With the night of its title only lasting ten minutes, Night of the Juggler is a joy to watch today for both its taut crime film narrative and the priceless snapshot of the Big Apple just before its yuppification and the rapid corporate and Wall Street-fueled transformation that still continues to this day. You also get a slew of character actors here including a one-scene bit by Alice, Sweet Alice's Linda Miller as Brolin's ex-wife, not to mention a wild segue through Times Square's sex show circuit featuring appearances by adult film legends Serena and Sharon Mitchell. Brolin and Gorman obviously get the meatiest material to work with and do a fine job here, with the latter making for a complex antagonist who goes into some deeply uncomfortable territory in the final stretch.

Initially released on VHS in the U.S. by Media and later circulated as one of those bad LP-speed budget tapes from Video Treasures which you could find in drugstores into the early '90s. From that point it became impossible to legally obtain anywhere, without even a TV showing until 2025. First out of the gate was a UHD and Blu-ray special edition from Kino Lorber, featuring a new 4K scan from the camera negative with HDR-compatible Dolby Vision for the UHD and DTS-HD MA 5.1 and mono 2.0 English audio with optional English SDH subtitles. Also included was a commentary by Steve Mitchell and this writer, so no evaluation on that one. "Summer of '78" (13m50s) features Brolin looking back at his early career days at Fox and Universal, his close rapport with Furie, coming on this film after The Car, being offered The Amityville Horror during shooting, using method techniques in his craft for better or worse, shooting the film in sequence with Furie for the first half hour's worth of material before the switch happened, and working with Butler's "basketball coach" approach. In "The Sweet Maria" (14m21s), Carmen discusses her frequent casting as nice characters around that time, her own life growing up in New York, the accent she had to put on for her character, the insistence Furie showed for casting her, and her own method commitment. Finally the Daniel Kremer visual essay "Pandemonium Reflex: An Inquest into Sidney J. Furie’s Night of the Juggler" (14m2s) explores how the film slots into Furie's thematic and stylistic focus, particularly its theme of wounded and struggling masculinity. Also included are the newly transferred trailer and bonus trailers for Stick, Death Wish 3, Vice Squad, Hardcore, and The Hunter.

Soon after that, Radiance Films in the U.K. chose this film as the inaugural release in its Transmission brand, also on UHD and Blu-ray. The presentation looks excellent and very similar to the U.S. with slightly less aggressive saturation in the color grading on the UHD. Here you get the English audio as LPCM 1.0 mono with optional English SDH subtitles, and most significantly, it fixes a quick, odd hiccup in the Kino release at the 31m20s where a shot of repeated footage of the kids unloading stolen kids from a van was repeated. Instead it's a single, longer continued shot of Gus and Kathy walking and talking, of comparable quality to the rest of the film. The Brolin and Carmen interviews are ported over here on the Blu-ray along with the Daniel Kremer piece and the trailer, plus new extras starting with a commentary by Kim Newman and Sean Hogan who cover urban crime films, the two directors' careers, the actors' credits, and comparable NYC-set films from around the same time. "The Meanest Streets" (28m35s) is a thorough and entertaining locations tour with Michael Gingold and interjections from production associate Chris Coles covering tons of key points of interest and a funny stories including a vivid one about Serena's hairdresser. Then "Fun City Limits: Fear & Loathing in Hollywood's NYC" (28m34s) is a new visual essay by Howard S. Berger surveying the terrain of the colorful, crime-riddled, and hugely cinematic city that lent itself to horror and comedy in equal doses in films like The Out-of-Towners, Cops and Robbers, The Hot Rock, Manhattan, The Seven-Ups, Maniac, and numerous Sidney Lumet films, with numerous elements like racial tensions and those ever-present rats coming into play in this film. A stills and poster gallery rounds out the set, with the limited edition package coming with a pull-out poster, six lobby-card style postcards, and a 40-page booklet with new essays by Glenn Kenny, Barry Forshaw, and Travis Woods.

Radiance Films (UHD)



Kino Lorber (UHD)



Radiance Films (Blu-ray)

Review on February 21, 2026