The Panic in Needle Park (1971)

Sherman Square is in NYC on the West Side at the intersection of Broadway and 72nd Street. It is known as Needle Park for its heroin addicts. Petty criminal addict Bobby (Al Pacino) is a friend to artist Marco (Raul Julia). Helen (Kitty Winn) is in the hospital after a bad abortion from relations with Marco. She is homeless and looking to go back to Indiana. She moves in with Bobby and slowly drifts into the dark world of drugs.This is very 70's. It's indie. It's grim and it's grimy. The two leads are compelling. It doesn't flinch away from the needle work. It's not pretty Hollywood but rather an ugly closeup vision. It is a bit slow and the plot meanders. There is a grinding inevitability to their predicament. It wallows in the gutter.

Episodic and sad, The Panic in Needle Park as a pitiful slice-of-life character study stands out amongst the other drug films of the 70s in its nuanced unfolding narrative of two hapless New York addicts and their ability to survive and stick together under the weight of Police tensions and their own faults.The excellent Kitty Winn is outstanding in the role of the sensitive artist Helen, who falls in love with Al Pacino's drug-addicted, petty criminal Bobby. Winn won the award at Cannes that year for her performance, and looking today, it's still as edgy as it was back in 1971. Pacino pretty much over-plays his part as the antagonist, and functions to support Winn's presence in the film.Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne based their script for the film on James Mills's reportage that was based on a photo spread about a drug-addicted couple that spent their days in Needle Park between pilfering and hustling for their next fix. The films gritty subject matter never sinks to the scatological, but rather, in the prose of Didion, and Dunne retains an elegiac sense.Director Jerry Schatzberg never allows the truth of images to become fuzzy, sticking to a clear documentary-like capturing of action. The camera lingers on characters injecting heroin after preparing the drug, and the images could function as a how-to video in some instances. The complete absence of any music track to indicate to the viewer what they should feel allows a deep sense of truth to burn through the screen.This is the film that Francis Ford Coppola showed to Paramount to convince them that Al Pacino was suitable for the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather. And in retrospect we can see that Pacino possesses a strength that is core to his persona, and certainly something that Coppola relied on to carry the central character of his film.This is not Pacino's best performance but his overbearing screen presence counters Winn's subtle nuanced creation of a woman eroding into human detritus. The film also captures much of the spirit of New York of the early 1970s, when the use of drugs was a relatively unsophisticated activity, very different from much of the condoned abuse that is tolerated today.Watch this film for excellent examples of film performances, and techniques that really don't exist anymore with the present crop of performers coming out of the acting schools. Winn retired too early after Panic brought her accolades, and Pacino continues to work on stage and in film, as his is the kind of acting that can be consider the finest of the period.

Jerry Schatzberg's "The Panic in Needle Park" is an incredibly well-made film, a major overlooked example of New Hollywood cinema. Al Pacino and Kitty Winn star as lovers Bobby and Helen who live in the city and who are addicted to heroin. The film is shot like a documentary, uses no music, and features some very disturbing, realistic scenes of heroin injection. There have been countless American movies that feature drug use, but "Needle Park" stood out to me. It isn't dated because much of the film's run-time focuses on Pacino and Winn (both in extraordinary performances) and how their relationship disintegrates because of their addictions. The final scene of the film is so bleak and haunting.

I just finished watching this movie for the first time as an adult. See I saw it when I must have been about 13 or so because hey, it's an Al Pacino flick. And being a Godfather fan at the time I figured why not go back even further, to his first big break as an actor. Well not a movie for kids, at all.Panic in Needle Park starts out with this young girl who is new to The Big City. Maybe looking for love, or maybe just looking for meaning in life. I'd say a little of both. Then Al Pacino walks in as Bobby, and her life steadily changes throughout the course of this movie. And watching the decline is heartbreaking and disturbing at the same time. See it's different watching Pacino's character because he is already down n out. Working the streets of New York, hustling to support his $50 a day Heroin Addiction. But Helen forcibly wants in on this life of self destruction, as a way for her to be part of something. To be accepted. She chooses to be with Bobby and that's the drama of this whole movie. By the end he even acknowledges SHE does too much of that stuff. It's just a bad way to end up in life.So very good cautionary tale that I would recommend to people maybe looking for some insight into a world sometimes hidden from view. And I'd say even 40 plus years later, This Movie is very relevant in modern times. Also you get to see some of the early Al Pacino explosive anger that he later became known for. But overall, A Drama of the darkest kind.