Around the corner from St. Marks and Avenue A, a block that's become synonymous with New York's ongoing flame-war over gentrification, a man turned his roommate into soup and fed her to the local homeless. Daniel Rakowitz, age 28, wasn’t from New York, and neither was his victim, 26-year-old Monika Beerle. When I’m walking to Tompkins Square Park, through the open-air food court now so packed the street must be closed-off to accommodate all the diners, I can’t help but see the account manager sipping an Aperol Spritz, or the junior risk analyst slurping pho, and think back to a weekend when, perhaps in those very same spots only 36 years prior, some unlucky vagrant was unwittingly becoming a cannibal.
To watch Night of the Juggler (1980) is to return to that bygone era, one both fondly and fearfully referred to as “the old New York.” Gangs roam the streets. Large swaths of The Bronx have been reduced to rubble. Times Square is awash in pimps and peep shows. It’s against this apocalyptic backdrop that William P. McGivern, the novelist behind The Big Heat (1953) and Odds Against Tomorrow (the book, 1957; the film, 1959), set his chase story about a fired NYPD cop who is now working as a long-haul trucker and hunting down the crazed kidnapper who took his daughter (Abby Bluestone), believing her to be someone else.
As Sean Boyd (James Brolin) drives, runs, and limps his way across the Five Boroughs (only weeks into principal photography, Brolin broke his foot, requiring a lengthy and expensive shutdown that cost the film its original director), Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman) explains his motivation to the captive 15-year-old Kathy (Abby Bluestone), who he incorrectly believes is the daughter of the real estate magnate responsible for razing his South Bronx neighborhood: “All the rich bastards lie. That's how they get rich and that's how they stay rich. They're not putting anything over on me because I'm wise to their tricks with their taxes and bullshit and all the little games they play so good, huh? They're all in it together, juggling the books. Well now they're gonna pay. Now I'm gonna be the juggler. I'm gonna juggle the books my way and it's gonna balance out to me.”
Soltic, who grew up wealthy but now labors in the tunnels beneath Central Park for the Parks Department, blames the Blacks, the Jews, the Puerto Ricans, and the rich for his reversal of fortune, seeing his transgression as an act of moral rectification, of balancing the scales in one’s own favor. One can imagine Rakowitz, the Texas transplant, projecting his own altruism in the simple act of feeding the needy. “Get some skin in the game, what you can afford to lose,” evangelized William Duplessie on a podcast in 2017, to those curious about dipping their toes into crypto. Duplessie, 33, was one of two “crypto-bros” arrested earlier this year for a kidnapping and torture plot that transpired in a SoHo townhouse. As I walk down St. Marks Place, I still see the same city laid bare in Night of the Juggler, only the names and faces are different. The old New York is dead, long live the old New York.
Night of the Juggler screens this evening, August 5, through August 14, at IFC.
