Purely Joyful Movie!

Dreadfully Boring

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

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.

(Flash Review)This hyper-real feeling portrayal of life as a heroin junky is a tough and sorrow-filled viewing. This appears to be Pacino's 2nd film (my key reason for watching it) and he plays a young man hooked on heroin who is also a small-time burglar to help pay for his habit. This film is also a depressing romance as a young, apparently homeless girl, meets Pacino and believe it or not finds stability in him! He gets her hooked and they share emotional ups and downs which is pretty much the focus of the film. It also shines a light into people addicted to this drug, which could easily be a PSA for stay away from drugs yet keeps a documentary angle rather than trying to get you to feel bad for them. This films also showed the most authentic-feeling scene of a man doing heroin. So authentic feeling, I thought he was actually doing the drug or studied addicts very carefully. Pretty heavy scene with gradation of phases rather than your Hollywood, quick needle poke and euphoric zone out. Grainy and grimy, this film is heavy and well-acted and is hard to forget.

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

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.