The Panic in Needle Park (1971) doesn’t have a very memorable ending, but the movie in toto is penetrating. Filmed in New York City, it concerns a man and a woman, lovers, in the grip of heroin addiction. Helen, the woman (Kitty Winn), a transplant from Indiana, knows that what’s going down in her new surroundings, in the pathetic big city, is questionable and indeed bad. But she becomes a user like her boyfriend Bobby (Al Pacino), an extroverted, unemployed nonentity. The subjects of experimentation, compromise, drift, squalor—the film presents them all. And it isn’t dated. Helen’s encounters with medical workers because of her neediness and suffering are true and disturbing.
Scriptwriter Joan Didion didn’t have all that much to do since Needle Park is based on a novel by James Mills and she collaborated with her husband John Gregory Dunne. Jerry Schatzberg directed. Pacino is piercingly strong in his acting job, expert at exhibiting thought. Winn is shattering as an evidently complex character.