Watched Journal: August 2025
With serial killers and kidnappers becoming a fixture of 20th century America, kids were told 'don't talk to strangers.' Most victims came from working class backgrounds. But for the rich and famous, a kidnapped Getty or murdered beauty pageant princess JonBenét Ramsey, those crimes made for dramatic headlines. Many of these cases have been adapted for the screen. Two of cinema's greatest films, M and The Night of The Hunter, concern killers preying on children.
But what happens when a film becomes lost?
For 45 years, this was the fate of Night of the Juggler, an obscure hybrid of Death Wish and The Warriors, set in gritty '70's New York - slimy subways, skeevy peep shows and dirty cops galore. Lost in the shuffle when Columbia Pictures was sold, Juggler had a brief theatrical run in 1980 and then went missing. Aside from a lone '80's VHS or shoddy YouTube rips, it was impossible to see.
Until this year when out of the blue it was announced that the Juggler had been restored in all of its seedy glory by Kino Lorber. Juggler returned to the big screen this summer with a pristine 4K glow up, showing at revival theaters across the country (even cracking the box office) and will make its Blu-ray debut this fall.
Juggler dovetails with another kidnapping movie released this August, Spike Lee's reunion with Denzel Washington, Highest 2 Lowest. But Juggler, shot in New York in 1978, captures the city when it was the Rotten Apple, riddled with crime and tension. It's a far cry from the sweeping, beautiful drone shots in Lee's film, flaunting the modern mecca of Manhattan.
The plot twist in Juggler and Highest 2 Lowest, a bait and switch where the wrong child is snatched, traces back to Akira Kurosawa's 1963 B&W masterpiece, High and Low. Lee's film is a more direct "reimagining" of Kurosawa's classic, replacing Toshiro Mifune's imposing Japanese shoe executive Kingo Gondo for Denzel's charismatic music mogul David King. Both are powerful men arriving at career crossroads, resisting the corporate forces conspiring to acquire everything they've built.
The kidnapping in Kurosawa's film is swift, landing as a shellshock in the first act where Gondo quickly discovers that the wrong kid, his chauffeur's son, has been abducted for ransom, unbeknownst to the perpetrators. Highest 2 Lowest takes more time to set-up, but if you've seen Kurosawa's film, you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is one of the many weaknesses of Lee's adaption, along with a cringe score, hollow supporting performances and various Spike-isms (an oddly framed Kamala Harris poster, numerous New York Knicks chest puffs) adding slices of distracting cheese to what could've been a hard boiled thriller.
Luckily, the film has a decent middle act, with a riveting subway sequence when King makes the ransom drop that leads to a heart-pounding chase, climaxing at the Puerto Rican Day parade. Much of High and Low is set within Gondo's mid century lair sitting high up on a hill that literally looks down on the kidnapper's village, a metaphor for the class divide at play. Lee is crafting a love letter to New York and his generation, his film is less about the haves and have-nots than the tension between old school and new school.
In its last act, Lee's film contrasts with Kurosawa's police procedural manhunt. Once the son of chauffeur Paul (Jeffrey Wright) returns home, he and King become vigilantes. King wants his money back. Paul seeks revenge. They clumsily get their man, a wannabe rapper, Yung Felon (ASAP Rocky), who idolizes King. Once the cases are closed, both Gondo and King face their foe behind bars as Lee remixes Kurosawa's unforgettable finale. King simply shrugs off Yung Felon's delusions of rap grandeur, as if he were merely a line item. Gondo appears a changed man.
In Robert Butler's Night of the Juggler, James Brolin plays a divorced, down on his luck ex-cop turned trucker. He's just clocked out from a long shift, excited to take his teenage daughter out to the ballet for her birthday. But as the audience knows from the opening credits sequence in which a disturbed man is playing with his breakfast, pouring ketchup on his eggs into a bloody mess, danger is lurking. Cliff Gorman plays the deranged Gus Soltic with harrowing menace, a psycho who lurks in the South Bronx, blaming a real estate tycoon on his neighborhood's downfall, seeking vengeance.
Butler's film wastes no time getting to the action. As Sean Boyd (Brolin) is taking a stroll with his daughter in Central Park, Soltic mistakes her for the tycoon's daughter and kidnaps her instead. But that's where Juggler takes a turn from Kurosawa, we witness the kidnapping and the immediate rush of blue collar Boyd chasing Soltic by foot, cab and car through the mean streets, smashing glass on a rampage to get his daughter back. It's a frantic sequence, recalling Friedkin's manic car chase in The French Connection. Once Soltic gets away, the film never lets up from the continuous thrill ride as we follow Boyd, who fends with clueless cops and vicious gangs as he scours the city searching for his girl.
Boyd eventually tracks down Soltic, rescuing his daughter in a finale that, fitting the movie's milieu, occurs in bowels of the sewer system. Once the two come to blows, Boyd brings Soltic to justice and reunites with his daughter above ground. The crowd pleasing climax reminds me of Weapons, the horror blockbuster starring James Brolin's son Josh, that has a similarly satisfying ending where good triumphs and the kids come home.
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