The Panic in Needle Park (Schatzberg, 1971): Garden Cinema, 3pm
This film is part of the Al Pacino season at the Garden Cinema and will be introduced by freelance film programmer Nathasha Orlando Kappler.
New Yorker review:
In their first major movie roles, Al Pacino and Kitty Winn star in Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 drama, as a pair of drug addicts drifting through Manhattan’s horror holes in a state of mutual self-destruction. The overheated Bobby (Pacino), a crook since childhood, is a bundle of jitters and motormouthed sass from the city streets. He cools down with the heroin that his girlfriend, Helen (Winn), a torpid artist from Indiana, uses to thaw her emotional core (frozen solid by an illegal abortion). The city seems rotted by the schemes of hustlers in need of a fix and by the law’s corrupting force (embodied by Alan Vint, as a soft-spoken, hard-nosed detective). Schatzberg doesn’t romanticize the addicts’ troubles; with a tender but unsparing eye, he spins visual variations on shambling degradation and on fleeting relief, and makes the sudden lurch of moods, ranging from bad to worse, his subject. Briskly panning telephoto shots, with their tremulous mysteries, reveal a city within a city, a second world of experience that shows through New York’s abraded surfaces.
Richard Brody
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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