It’s easy to forget today, but in 1971 Al Pacino was not a star. He didn’t look or sound like stars were supposed to. For starters, he was too short and too 'dark’ (which is to say, too 'ethnic looking’, and lest we forget this was the Age of the Blond WASP, Ryan O’Neal and Robert Redford!) When he went for the role of Michael in The Godfather, Paramount thought it was an appalling idea. Perhaps what turned them off was not only Pacino’s looks, but his career choices.
Anyway, he's outstanding in Jerry Schatzberg’s grim, low budget character-piece about heroin addicts in a scummy and cold New York, The Panic in Needle Park. In it, Pacino looks unwashed, sullen and sallow faced, a young man prematurely aged by dope, and the anguish that comes with a life lived on the edge of betrayal.
Perhaps made under the sign of Cassavetes, and the Actor’s Studio, Panic doesn’t have much plot. At heart it is essentially a sad-faced love story, and Pacino’s slouchy, dope peddler and low-end thief begins the film as a supporting bit. The film’s real focus lies in Kitty Winn’s Helen. In the course of the action, she’s kicked around, abused, used, and demeaned. It was the kind of 'doormat’ character that gave so called 'realist’ '70s movies a bad name (and feminists some justification in claiming that by decades end, even so-called New Hollywood were still backwards looking in terms of gender and style).
In one of the film’s genuine ironies, Helen hooks up with Bobby because she’s moved by his kindness; and off they go and before too long, the handsome but grotty narc-freak has dragged Helen into a deadening cycle of low rent rooms, and score-quick-'n’-split schemes. In short time Helen is turning tricks and Bobby starts to feel out of his depth emotionally.
In its day the film was thought daring; there was the hand-held feel in the camerawork and the black, poo-brown and OD Blue in its colour palette, making New York look decidedly unglamorous. There was too a dedication to documentary facts of life about the 'Dope Fiend’; this is the kind of movie that features ginormous close-ups of addicts shooting up. Still, what’s bracing today isn’t the movies [then] fashionable pessimism, or its look or feel, but the depth in the performances that outpace the screenwriting, by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. There’s a particularly beautiful moment early on from Pacino when refuses to have sex with Helen because 'it’s too soon" in their relationship; there's nothing showy or easy about the moment... just a real tenderness.
Critics haven’t been kind to Winn, but, saddled with a limited role, she holds the movie together with some striking and subtle playing. It was banned in England on its first release. The title, incidentally, refers to the denizens of Verdi Squ and Sherman Squ near NY’s Broadway. The 'panic’ is what sweeps the doper’s milieu once word gets out that the supply of smack is running dry; faced with this crisis, they 'score’ off snitching to cops"¦
The disc comes with a trailer and given the age of the materials, the print seen here in a pretty good shape with solid detail and accurate colour.
