The Panic in Needle Park (1971)

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

"The Panic in Needle Park" is an incredibly unpleasant film...which is what you'd expect about a film that centers around two heroin addicts living in New York. So, if you are looking for a film to make you smile or a good date film, do NOT see this movie! In fact, that is the biggest problem with the picture...most folks won't wanna see two people slowly destroying themselves. Most folks watch films to be entertained. Now I am NOT saying it's a bad film and it might be a good one to show teens, as it shows how wretched a life hooked on drugs can be...though there are a few more recent films which make drug use seem a lot more unpleasant, such as the brilliant but hard to watch "Requiem for a Dream".The film has very little in the way of plot. It simply shows two addicts who are in love, Bobby and Helen (Al Pacino and Kitty Winn), as they slowly degenerate...sinking lower and lower and lower through the course of the movie. At first, Bobby is very glib...and fun to be with and Helen seems rather innocent. Naturally, this doesn't last and both sink deeper and deeper into their habit. Bobby claims he's a 'chipper' (a casual user who is not addicted) but after a while he's dealing and overdoses. Helen begins turning tricks to buy their next fix. Unpleasant, to be sure, but mostly realistic. When they shot up, it looks real...and the language is street language...nasty and crude. But the only problem I saw is that both LOOKED healthy through the course of the film and the makeup could have been better...enabling them not only to act like addicts but to look more like them. Well made but I am strongly warning you...it's not a movie for kids or for the squeamish.

The Panic in Needle Park is an American art film that would have found its natural home in a 42nd Street grind house—although the new print of this 1971 Jerry Schatzberg dope opera looks a lot better now than it did then.The love story. Plain and simple, that was it. It was an interesting world that we hadn't seen on the screen in exactly that way....And as I've said, A hidden love story deep inside the lives of two heroin junkies somewhere on Manhattan's West Side, which came out of hiding all of a sudden and what a love story it was...Opening to severely mixed reviews, The Panic in Needle Park was trashed for its incongruously fashionable creators (former fashion photographer Schatzberg, screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne), and is remembered mainly for its performances. Making his film debut as the hustler-junkie Bobby, 30-year-old Al Pacino went straight to The Godfather and on to Pacino-dom; Kitty Winn, cast as his wide- eyed consort Helen, won the Best Actress award at Cannes and soon after retired in obscurity.Winn pretty much plays it as it lays—her obvious acting works with her character's weak sense of self. Pacino, however, is a force of nature. Chewing gum and chain- smoking Kools, this mop-topped motormouth is as wired as Robert DeNiro's Johnny Boy and as cute as Woody Allen's Alvy Singer. "I'm not hooked, I'm just chippin' " Bobby tells smitten Helen, a little lost girl slumming with a vengeance. Of course, once he discovers she's been supporting her habit by turning tricks, he throws the classic Pacino tantrum.The movie is filled with choice "Fun City" locations (an authentic cold water loft; the hustler-ridden Whalen's at the corner of 8th Street and Sixth Avenue), although the triangle where Broadway crosses 72nd Street stood in for the eponymous junkie hangout, a block away.Relative neorealism and an open ending were not unusual in 1971, but The Panic in Needle Park, is unusually sordid: Helen is introduced taking a crowded subway home from an illegal abortion; the movie is punctuated by close-ups of junkies shooting and booting. Schatzberg's compassion for his characters seems boundless, but it's hard to know whether the scene in which the dope-addled lovers adopt a puppy would make W.C. Fields laugh or cry.Thank You, @asifahsankhan

Jerry Schatzberg's grim film about junkies circa 1971 New York has become something of a classic due in large part to the fact that it contains Al Pacino's first starring role. Pacino is indeed a dynamo as Bobby, a heroin addict and petty crook (he's better at being a junkie than he is at stealing). He's well matched with Kitty Winn as his girlfriend, a free-spirited would-be artist who also succumbs to shooting up. It's so extremely realistic d and shot on the same grimy NYC streets as Paul Morrissey's TRASH, that it's sometimes hard to believe a film crew was even at work. Pacino & Winn are excellent and so is Richard Bright as Pacino's entrepreneurial brother (he's a pusher who wears a suit and tie). Raul Julia, Alan Vint (perfect as a duplicitous narc) and Kiel Martin co-star. Winn won the best actress award at Cannes. The script is by John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion.

The Panic in Needle Park is a 1971 American film directed by Jerry Schatzberg and starring Al Pacino in his second film appearance. The screenplay was written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, adapted from the book by James Mills.The story of a rather empty and silly girl with no life who hooks up with a charming loser junkie somehow comes off as the eternal love story. Bobby (Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn) meet through the pretentious Mexican artist Marco (Raúl Juliá), Helen's boyfriend, a man so narcissistic he would rather score drugs from Bobby than worry about Helen's back alley abortion, leaving her bleeding on the floor of his studio while he scouts for blow – ironically leading to her turning to Bobby for support and romance.Shot in the cinéma vérité-style without any music whatsoever, many passerbys look straight at the camera – this is a documentary, with Winn and Pacino sliding into the world that existed in Needle Park in the 70′s – Needle Park being Sherman Square and surrounds, named for the amount of heroin users jones'ing about the area. Pacino improvises with a tall African pimp on the street, " I got nothing'" he says, with a quick smile as he bowls along 72nd Street. They sit on a kerb, Bobby wearing a headscarf like an old peasant woman, cold and bored as feet rush by their noses. New York seems utterly futile and flat – with no hope for the likes of these underachievers.Thought to be the first movie in which full-on real drug injection is seen, this is as stark as it gets – but there's no humor or irony here as in Spun or Pulp Fiction. This is nasty, bleak, boring drug-taking with nothing people in void lives. New York is grim, sludgy with old snow; cold and gray. The addicts live in an alternate reality like ghosts as commuters go about their day – they only see each other as if anyone not on heroin is invisible.The Panic is a term used to describe a drought of supply – and there's a big shortage coming. But also The Panic is about their habit. As Bobby is "chipping" – a term to mean using recreationally – he develops a $50 a day habit – and this, so his brother, the burglar Hank (Richard Bright) tells him, is going to be an issue. Where's the money going to come from? What if he can't get a fix? Helen, bored of waiting for Bobby, gauched out in bed for hours on end when she wants sex, starts using too. Their relationship is so distant despite their close proximity 24 hours a day that Bobby doesn't notice straight away, only seeing her eyes eventually and asking " When did that happen?" Of course, it's not long before Helen is addicted too – and takes a job as a waitress to support their habit. Obviously a junkie waitress isn't going to do too well, and she quickly turns to hooking to make the vast amount of cash they need to sustain their drug bingeing.Performances are straight A all round, with Pacino turning in the performance that landed him The Godfather, and Winn was awarded Best Actress at Cannes that year, going on to star as Sharon Spencer, Regan's tutor in The Exorcist.Some ratings boards gave this film an X rating, such as in Germany and Britain, leading onto a spate of X-rated movies such as A Clockwork Orange and Deliverance. For me, it's the truth that lies inside the screenplay that makes this an X-rated movie – that there are people out there who live like this – a prostitute hides her baby in the toilet with Helen and Bobby, who is at that moment OD'ing and puking in the bowl, so she can let in her john for his appointment; Helen and Bobby find it funny when they rob a young guy after her turning a trick with him. They beat each other, cheat on each other, steal from each other – and yet they stick together like glue.There's obvious comparison to Requiem For A Dream, but this is even more bleak and realistic – these people aren't charming or good-looking or even interesting – there's no poetry. The co-dependency is so strong that Helen freaks and runs to the streets searching for Bobby when she wakes up alone in the apartment they share. They writhe on dirty old blankets in moldy rented rooms and pass out in greasy street diners. The neon sign " Drugs" hangs red through the window as Bobby consoles Helen with banana cake when she comes down.A terrible scene where a puppy dies – which reminded me of the Apocalypse Now puppy that disappears after the shoot-out on the boat and makes me cry every time. Even when a narcotics cop Hotch (the late Alan Vint) takes a fancy to Helen and tries to help her, it seems out of lust rather than any genuine care for her situation – because who cares about these rotten souls? And that is why the movie keeps on turning like a horrible carousel to the very end – without each other, Bobby and Helen would not even exist.A destroying watch.