Movie of the Week: “The Panic in Needle Park”

The site in question in “The Panic in Needle Park,” Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 feature film, starring Al Pacino and Kitty Winn, is the area around West Seventy-second Street and Broadway, in Manhattan—two little parks, Sherman Square and Verdi Square, that now mark a crossroads of prosperity. Schatzberg, a native New Yorker, doesn’t romanticize the tough lives and grimy surroundings of the drama's mainly young heroin addicts. He observes the neon-lit hallways and uninviting coffee shops with a rueful fascination; he reveals the economic, legal, and moral pincers in which addicts get caught; and he doesn’t leaven his view of his characters’ dilemmas with amateur sociologizing. There’s a poetry to crime and to punishment, to the wiles of law enforcement and to those of law evasion, to suffering and to pleasure, to hatred and to love. Schatzberg creates a tremulous visual palette of briskly panning telephoto shots and macrophotographic intimacy that unfolds a city within a city and reveals a second world of experience that shows through New York’s abraded surfaces. He only hints at the mysteries of drugs themselves—but he does so with a grand cinematic invention that rises to the resulting agonies.

P.S.: A remarkable new movie coming to the New York Film Festival this fall—“Heaven Knows What,” directed by Josh and Benny Safdie—revisits both the location and the subject of “The Panic in Needle Park.” There's also a Profile of Al Pacino by John Lahr in this week's issue.