Panic in Needle Park - early Pacino on DVD
June 21st, 2007 in Actors, Drama, Dvd, Reviews, classic
One of the new DVD releases this week is the drama Panic in Needle Park. Made in 1971, the film is a story about heroin addicts in New York City. In his second feature film, Al Pacino starred along with Kitty Winn as two junkies whose love for each other is not enough to overcome their need for drugs.
While Pacino was an acclaimed actor on the New York stage at the time the film was made. Among the other cast members who would receive future recognition are Paul Sorvino and Raul Julia. Shot almost literaly on the streets of New York City, the film has something of a documentary feel, emphasised by the acting that appears improvised, and the absence of a music score.
Even though the film sometimes appears to have been made up on the spot, there is a screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, famed for their respective literary endeavors. The film was directed by Jerry Schatzberg who would team up with Pacino again on the film Scarecrow.
The title refers to a park in New York City that was infamous as a hangout for junkies and dealers. The panic is when the heroin supply has become short. Addiction does not look romantic in this film, with its close-ups of needles piercing arms, and lives made of desperation and increasingly bad choices. Panic in Needle Park is a downbeat film, but not atypical of the kind of experimentation that came from the major studios in the early Seventies.
It may be easy to surmise why studio execs were reluctant about casting Pacino in The Godfather. While there is nothing to fault about the intense performance, it is also a challenge to imagine that the short, scruffy, pasty faced Pacino could be more than a character actor. Director Schatzberg seems to have been infatuated with Kitty Winn, an up and coming actress at the time, as she has the most close ups. Winn appeared in the first two Exorcist films, but seems to have retired from film acting after 1978.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Stumble it! / Bookmark:
