A dark variation on the Romeo and Juliet story, it starred Ben Piazza and Anne Pearson as teenage lovers on the run from the authorities, unable to legally elope and get married.
Shot on location in Toronto, the film followed a young, jazz-obsessed hipster wandering aimlessly through the city's streets and metro stations, who finds himself plunged into the world of illicit drug smuggling while pursuing a femme fatale.
A direct refutation of his home town's squeaky-clean self-image, the film suffered the same fate as his previous one, failing to find a proper distributor and falling into obscurity.
His brief dip into the kitchen sink realism movement produced The Leather Boys, which in addition to showcasing the period's rocker subculture, is considered groundbreaking due to its latent homosexual themes.
Intended as a direct response to the popularity of the James Bond franchise, the film showcased a darker, more downbeat portrayal of espionage.
Furie worked closely with director of photography Otto Heller to shoot through and around foreground objects, creating a "refracted" view of the action and an all-encompassing sense of paranoia.
Furie relocated again, this time to Hollywood, where he began his American directing career with The Appaloosa, a Western film starring Marlon Brando and John Saxon.
Furie was later attached to direct the similarly-themed remake of The Jazz Singer, but was replaced by Richard Fleischer halfway through principal photography.
[20][21] Furie wrote and directed the 1986 action war film Iron Eagle, adapting a screenplay by writer Kevin Alyn Elders based on the real-life 1981 Gulf of Sidra incident.
The film was overshadowed by the release of the similarly themed Top Gun later that year,[22] but proved successful enough on home video to warrant three sequels, two of which Furie directed.