VEILED THREATS by Phil Mershon
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THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK
Directed by Jerry Schatzberg
Written by Joan Didion
Starring Al Pacino
​Released in 1971
Picture
 A decade ago everyone who meandered through my life over a fourteen-month period lived on painkillers: Vicodin, oxycodone, morphine, Darvocet, Tramadol, you name it. Unable to sleep, they would load up on benzo jellies or anything in the lam or pam family. In the morning they'd do a line of soda or some crushed up psych meds and repeat the waltz. Christ, what an awful way to live, I thought. And I was right.
    The Panic in Needle Park (1971) shows us pain. Admittedly, if heroin wasn't fun, no one would ever do it. I have been told it is the psycho-physical equivalent of napalming yourself. I guess napalm must be fun, too, or no one would ever have used it. 
    A lot of people take painkillers even now. I prefer to think of these things as "painkillers" rather than referring to them by their clinical or street names because I think it's important to remember that the reason people take them is to alleviate pain. Sometimes that pain manifests in a physiological manner. Sometimes the pain shows itself to be neurological. It really doesn't matter, I suppose, because if you are the person suffering then you want it to stop. When it turns out the pain not only goes away but is replaced by a decided sense of pleasure, well, it can be asking a lot to encourage someone to resist it. 
    In Panic, director Jerry Schatzberg gives us no particular list of reasons why these characters--Bobby, Helen, Chico, Irene, and others--have taken on the lives of junkies. Because Bobby (played in pure beauty by Al Pacino) has a burglar brother, the suggestion seems to be that it runs in families, or maybe it's just something white people do to try to identify with African-Americans. The Joan Didion script comes off just that disengaged, although Pacino and the late Kiel Martin (as Chico) do appear to be having the times of their lives, at least until the addictions become overly pricey and the greed of the fix takes hold. It's at that point that the struggling artist Helen, portrayed by Kitty Winn (who regular viewers of anything 1970s-oriented will recognize from being under-utilized in all manner of work, despite her winning the Cannes festival for her role here), turns to prostitution to feed her habit, just as Bobby turns to making big scores that will free the two of them from this rotten existence, except that it never quite does, it never quite does. The cop keeps telling Helen that she will sooner or later rat out her boyfriend because that is what junkies do and we see it coming and the real shame is that neither the screenwriter nor director give us any real reason to care. Only the acting saves this film--well, that and a very brief appearance by Paul Sorvino, which is worth watching for. 
    But the movie does bring up an interesting point. I mean, does everybody eventually rat out their friends and do the friends learn to take that abuse in stride? This movie screams that the drugs ear us down so far that even a betrayal that lands a lover in stir for six months--that is, if the lover in turn rats out the person above him on the dope ladder--is just business as usual, perhaps not a welcome behavior but certainly not an unforgivable offense, either. 
    With so much emphasis on the techniques of shooting up, fading out, nodding off and stringing along, none of which have any glamour whatsoever, The Panic in Needle Park loses whatever good will it may have hoped to garner. If the subject is important enough to warrant this very serious film, then aren't the people affected by it--or their on-screen representatives--worth developing as individuals? The only thing we see are people helping one another score, or a woman freaking out because Bobby almost dies from an overdose while she's expecting company, or just how debased life is here in New York City. 
    My first thought about a soundtrack that this film could have sorely used might have included the Velvet Underground's "Heroin." That my memory reconnected that in this day of merging time zones and infinity of perception, a better mix would be The Brains' original "Money Changes Everything," especially with its lines: "And you say, well who can you trust? I'll tell you it's just no one else's money."
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  • Home
  • Links
  • The Deluge
    • Veiled Threats >
      • 1939-1945
      • 1946-1963
      • 1964-1975
      • 1976-1985
      • Born Losers
      • Don't Look Back
      • Bonnie and Clyde
      • Cool Hand Luke
      • The Graduate
      • Up Tight!
      • Cycle Savages
      • Wild in the Streets
      • Never a Dull Moment
      • Yellow Submarine
      • Night of the Living Dead
      • Faces
      • The Love Bug
      • Midnight Cowboy
      • Easy Rider
      • Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
      • Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
      • They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
      • The Magic Christian
      • Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
      • The Landlord
      • The Ballad of Cable Hogue
      • Getting Straight
      • The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
      • Five Easy Pieces
      • Godard in America
      • Gimme Shelter
      • Little Big Man
      • The Boys in the Band
      • Joe
      • The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
      • The Big Boss
      • There's a Girl in my Soup
      • The Liberation of L B Jones
      • Klute
      • The French Connection
      • Willie Dynamite
      • Helter Skelter
      • King: A Filmed Record
      • Get Carter
      • Harold and Maude
      • Panic in Needle Park
      • Across 110th Street
      • And Soon the Darkness
      • Deliverance
      • Rolling Thunder
      • Super Fly
      • Busting
      • The Ruling Class
      • The Harder They Come
      • Day of the Jackal
      • Play Misty For Me
      • The Jezebels
      • Sacco & Vanzetti
      • Badlands
      • Cold Turkey
      • Soldier Blue
      • American Graffiti
      • The Falcon and the Snowman
      • Watership Down
      • Scarecrow
      • Walking Tall
      • Frances
      • The Coca-Cola Kid
      • Bob Roberts
      • Bad Company
      • We Are Marshall
      • Patton
      • The Natural
      • The Crossing Guard
      • Reds
      • The Spook Who Sat by the Door
      • Mud
      • Who is Harry Nilsson
      • Ornette: Made in America
      • Six Degrees of Separation
      • This Film is Not Yet Rated
      • Incident at Oglala
      • That Championship Season
      • The Pope of Greenwich Village
      • Little Murders
      • Assault on Precinct 13
      • Capote
      • Inglourious Basterds
      • The Friends of Eddie Coyle
      • Scorpio
      • The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
      • A New Leaf
      • Seven Psychopaths
      • The Last House on the Left
      • The Deer Hunter
      • Let the Right One In
      • Colour Me Kubrick
      • A Time to Kill
      • A Scanner Darkly
      • Salem's Lot
      • Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired
      • The Seven-Ups
      • The Contender
      • Hoffa
      • The Pledge
      • American: The Bill Hicks Story
      • Donnie Brasco
      • Bugsy
      • Milk
      • Reservoir Dogs
      • Glengarry Glen Ross
      • V for Vendetta
      • Trumbo
      • Two in the Wave
      • South of the Border
      • Into the Abyss
      • God Bless America
  • Before the Deluge
    • The Bicycle Thief
    • Judgment at Nuremberg
    • Five Minutes to Live
    • The Manchurian Candidate
    • Hud
    • Pressure Point
    • Blow Up
    • Requiem for a Heavyweight
    • Hurry Sundown
  • Human Flood
    • Jean-Luc Godard >
      • Breathless
      • Masculine Feminine
      • Film Socialisme
    • Brian De Palma >
      • Sisters
      • The Fury
    • Stanley Kubrick >
      • Lolita
      • 2001: A Space Odyssey
      • A Clockwork Orange
      • The Shining
      • Full Metal Jacket
    • Francis Coppola >
      • The Conversation
      • Apocalypse Now
    • Woody Allen >
      • Take the Money and Run
      • Bananas
      • Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But were Afraid to Ask
      • Sleeper
      • Love and Death
      • Annie Hall
      • Interiors
      • Manhattan
      • Stardust Memories
      • Zelig
      • Broadway Danny Rose
      • The Purple Rose of Cairo
      • Hannah and Her Sisters
      • Radio Days
    • Robert Altman >
      • M*A*S*H
      • Brewster McCloud
      • 3 Women
      • Nashville
      • The Gingerbread Man
      • Ready to Wear
      • Gosford Park
      • The Player
    • Luis Bunuel >
      • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    • Roman Polanski >
      • Cul-de-Sac
      • Rosemary's Baby
      • MacBeth
      • The Tenant
    • Martin Scorsese >
      • Boxcar Bertha
    • Steven Spielberg >
      • Duel
    • Oliver Stone >
      • Talk Radio
    • Orson Welles >
      • F For Fake
    • Akira Kurosawa >
      • DODES'KA-DEN
    • Max Ophuls
    • John Ford >
      • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    • John Huston
    • Frank Capra
    • Billy Wilder
    • Roger Corman
    • Bernardo Bertolucci
    • Elia Kazan
    • William Wyler
    • Spike Lee
    • Francois Truffaut >
      • 400 Blows
      • Jules and Jim
      • Bed and Board
    • Jean Renoir
    • Federico Fellini
    • Charlie Chaplin
    • John Cassavetes
    • Agnes Vargas
    • Alain Resnais
    • Eric Rohmer >
      • Claire's Knee
    • Ida Lupino
    • Leni Riefenstahl
    • Penny Marshall
    • Costa-Gavras >
      • The Confession
      • Missing
    • Alfred Hitchcock >
      • Spellbound
      • Shadow of a Doubt
      • The Birds
      • I Confess
      • Dial M for Murder
      • Rear Window
      • To Catch a Thief
      • The Wrong Man
      • Suspicion
      • Saboteur
      • Lifeboat
      • Notorious
      • Rope
      • North by Northwest
      • Psycho
      • The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
  • No Particular Place to Go
  • The Pits
    • The Big Chill
    • W. C. Fields and Me
    • Zabriskie Point
    • Eat The Document
    • Hitler: The Last Ten Days
    • A Boy and His Dog
    • A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
    • The Executioner's Song
    • The Visitors
    • Paul McCartney Really is Dead
    • Going Places
    • Pi
    • Erik the Viking
    • Sometimes They Come Back
    • Thinner
    • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    • A Bullet for Pretty Boy
  • Links