Watch The Panic in Needle Park For Free

Admirable film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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.

I remember watching this movie shortly after release. It was screening in a Sunday night double feature with another druggie movie the title of which is lost in the mists of time "Reefer Madness" maybe. The theatre which was jam-packed with gazillions of 1970's ne'er do wells was had an atmosphere more redolent of a rock festival than a movie screening. I remember the scene well simply because Panic demonstrated two 'qualities' that Hollywood took to heart. Firstly that this movie which was one of the first films exclusively devoted to contemporaneous drug culture made a lot of money and a new genre was born. The second was that "Panic" featured a lot of tropes about the evil and general inhumanity of heroin addicts that are still Hollywood standard issue despite the fact they are clichés. Few movie or TV makers question those tropes even though they are wrong. e.g. A junkie will sell his mother to cop a blast and all junkies are snitches with no sense of honour who never tell the truth.If anyone reads this review there is about a 99% chance what is written here will not penetrate their indoctrination.

The Panic in Needle Park is a 1971 film directed by Jerry Schatzberg about two young heroin addicts and their life in Needle Park. Bobby (Al Pacino), a heroin dealer takes Helen (Kitty Winn) home with him after she is abandoned. While living with Bobby, Helen turns to heroin, since Bobby and all of his friends all are users. She eventually becomes addicted and despite her declining health, she continues using and starts street walking to pay for her addiction. While this is happening, Bobby becomes the big dealer in Needle Park. After being arrested, Helen agrees to set up Bobby when he meets his supplier and the movie ends as Bobby is released from prison.While the movies deals with the very serious issue of heroin use, that only serves as a background for the love story between Bobby and Helen. The message of the movie is that love, while not always perfect, can be found in the hardest of times, between the unlikeliest of people. This is shown when no matter what happened in the film, whether it be Helen turning tricks to buy drugs, Bobby getting arrested for selling drugs, or just the two of them suffering withdrawals, Bobby and Helen found a way to make their relationship work, They stayed together even when their addictions threatened to smother them.The most rewarding part of this film was the intensity of the shooting up rituals. Schatzerg's choice to show the entire process, all the while having two very soft, but distinct conversations (one about the lack of heroin in Needle Park, the other Helen telling Bobby she does not like waking up alone) make the scene both horrifying and romantic, with only a young love to soften the blow of a dirty drug. Other than those scenes, the best scene in the film is the ending, where all that is needed is a simple question to make everything between them, from the betrayals, the drugs, and the prostituting, ceases to matter, because Helen and Bobby love each other.

I've seen this movie several times and even the first time I saw it --back in the early 70's I knew that Kitty Winn's performance was vastly superior to Al Pacino's. Now I am a big fan of Al in subsequent films but he is "acting" in this film and his "movie star" quality does not aid him in this gritty film in which every actor seems like a street person EXCEPT for Pacino. Kitty Winn, a brilliant stage actress gives a heartbreaking and subtle performance from the first frame to the last. Quite astonishing and it holds up every time. Al went on the greater glory but Kitty wins the prize for this one and not just at Cannes.