I had somehow never seen a full episode of the criminal-justice procedural Law & Order before this year. Since the start of this summer, however, I’ve watched nearly 100 episodes of the series, as it quickly became my go-to nightly watch after I ran out of episodes of The Sopranos. As a result, nearly everything I watch these days is filtered through a Law & Order lens. It’s not just detective stories & courtroom dramas either. The show is so lousy with recognizable actors that I’ve already seen big-namers like Ann Dowd, Christine Baranski, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney repeat as multiple unrelated characters only four seasons into the show (among one-off stunt casting appearances from unexpected heavy-hitters like Elaine Stritch, Tony Todd, and James Earl Jones), like a local repertory-theatre troop with a globally famous cast. So, I like to think it’s somewhat justifiable that Law & Order was at the top of my mind during a local screening of the new Night of the Juggler restoration that’s currently making the theatrical rounds. Released a full decade before Law & Order premiered in 1990, Night of the Juggler is a grimy NYC detective story similar to the 1st-act investigations of my new vintage-television obsession. While it doesn’t share early Law & Order‘s more prestigious contributions from cinematographer Ernest Dickerson or mad-genius screen actor Michael Moriarty, it does overlap significantly with the below-the-line cast & crew, including Dan Hedeya playing a violently corrupt police sergeant in both titles. In total, there are 28 contributors who worked on both Night of the Juggler and Law & Order—mostly NYC-based character actors—which feels like a substantial number even if it doesn’t remotely compare with the 757 contributors who worked on both Law & Order and my previous nightly catch-up show, The Sopranos.

There is one major payoff Night of the Juggler offers that even peak-era Law & Order couldn’t afford: action. In most of the NYPD investigations on Law & Order, suspects who flee the scene are quickly apprehended by detectives Logan & Briscoe at the same shooting location where they’re spotted. The show is largely a crime-of-the-week soap opera that contains its scene-to-scene drama to a series of courtrooms, judges’ chambers, and holding cells. Night of the Juggler cannot be contained. It runs wild in the streets of New York City, staging multiple, lengthy chase scenes that hop from taxi to subway train to public park to porno theatre to underground cellar, leaving a trail of wrecked cars & hot dog carts in its wake. Its premise is typical to an early Law & Order episode, though, even if it’s one the show would likely save for a season-finale ratings spike. Cliff Gorman plays a run-of-the-mill maniac New Yorker who exacts revenge upon the millionaire real estate developers who gentrified his neighborhood by kidnapping one of the business pricks’ teenage daughter in Central Park. Only, he mistakenly kidnaps her doppelganger, the daughter of a tough-as-nails truck driver and former cop played by James Brolin. So, not only is there no way for the unscrupulous sleaze to cash the teen in for the demanded million-dollar ransom, but now he also has a crazed working-class brute on his tail who’s willing & able to punch him to death for the offense — as soon as he can catch up with him. Dressed more like a lumberjack than an ex-cop city boy, Brolin is a macho folk hero who takes a principled stand against the flagrant crime of late-70s NYC by chasing down the man who wronged him for vigilante justice while NYPD’s finest twiddle their thumbs (or, in the case of Dan Hedeya’s wild-eyed corrupt sergeant, attempt to take down the obvious victim instead of the obvious creep).

Night of the Juggler is the kind of low-budget, anything-goes filmmaking that’s most remarkable for the unpredictability of its minor details. Gorman’s unpredictability as the crazed kidnapper is especially thrilling. He’s introduced at a greasy-spoon diner, making a smiley face out of his bacon & eggs breakfast plate before dousing that culinary cartoon with excessive ketchup gore. He’s scary because his every move is impossible to anticipate, especially as he seemingly falls in love with his underage “Million Dollar Baby” kidnapping victim while making threatening phone calls to the wrong family about what he’ll do to her if they don’t pay up (including her sending her back home as “chunks of meat”). There is no shortage of NYC freaks on his level here. The city is overflowing with the criminally insane, making it near impossible for James Brolin to navigate his way back to his daughter before she’s torn apart by the horde. Despite drowning in that bottomless cesspool of cretins, both Brolin and his kidnapped kid continually express a deep, unbreakable love for the city and its people, which makes the movie oddly charming despite the frequent escalations of its violence. Sure, Brolin is on a similar vengeance mission as Charles Bronson is in the Death Wish series, but in this case the criminal he’s after is the racist lunatic, not the hero; Brolin generally loves the people of New York, chastising his ex-wife for abandoning the city for the safer, blander refuge of suburban Connecticut. When Mandy Patinkin appears as a vigilante cabbie, or Sharon Mitchell shows up to work the peep show booths on 42nd Street, or Richard Castellano stops his police investigation dead to instead inquire about how frozen yogurt is made, the Big Apple comes across as a great city spoiled only by its few bad apples, among which are the cops who care more about personal profit than the people they supposedly serve.

Night of the Juggler‘s recent return to theaters is a cause to celebrate among longtime fans who luckily caught it during its original run or during its subsequent late-night cable broadcasts, as it’s essentially become lost media in the four decades since. The new restoration is especially being heralded by genre-film junkies who watched the scuzzy, taped-off-the-TV scan of it that made its way to YouTube in recent years. That scuzziness isn’t totally inappropriate for a movie that mostly characterizes New York City as a collection of feral rats scurrying around underground jets of steam, but I imagine the pixelation of a low-quality YouTube upload would’ve made it borderline illegible during its multiple whirlwind street chases, so there’s never been a better time to catch up with it than now, really. Not for nothing, there’s also never been a better time to catch up with early seasons of Law & Order if you missed its original run, since it consistently aired out-of-sequence during its years of televised syndication. It also looks incredible streaming in HD as a relic from when major-network primetime dramas were shot on actual celluloid and featured contributions from world-class actors & cinematographers. Law & Order and Night of the Juggler: two great, greasy tastes that taste extra great & greasy together.

-Brandon Ledet